Inaugural "Sunnyside" Festival
Posted: Thu Sep 06, 2012 7:01 am
Report of the Inaugural “Sunnyside” Festival 2012
© Stephen Whiteside 06.09.2012
The inaugural "Sunnyside" Festival took place at Kallista (Victoria) this year on Friday 31st August and Saturday 1st September.
The festival takes its name from the property, "Sunnyside", purchased by arts patrons Garry and Roberta Roberts in 1910. The Roberts played host to a range of writers and artists at "Sunnyside", their most famous guest being the poet C. J. Dennis, who completed his masterpiece "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke" in a tramcar on their property in 1914. Garry Roberts was a senior executive of the Melbourne Tramway & Omnibus Company, and he arranged for obsolete horse-drawn omnibuses (they were being replaced by cable tram technology) to be placed in the paddocks around the "Sunnyside" homestead.
Other visitors to the original "Sunnyside" property included the cartoonists and illustrators Hal Gye and David Low, the artists Percy Leason, John Shirlow, Harold Herbert, Alick McClintock and M. J. McNally, the writer Mrs Aeneas Gunn, and the journalist Guy Innes. (It was Guy Innes who drove the English Poet Laureate John Masefield to Dennis' Toolangi home many years later, in 1934.)
Garry Roberts died in 1933. "Sunnyside" was sold shortly after, and the house burnt down in 1935. Roberta Roberts died in 1936. The property has since been subdivided, with the area extensively re-planted in the 1930s. There is now a range of private properties on either side of Sunnyside Avenue on the site of the Roberts' original property.
The festival arose spontaneously from a house concert hosted by Maria Bohan and Adrian Evans in February this year to celebrate the legacy of “Sunnyside”. Performers on that night were myself, poet and reciter Jim Brown (who is also Secretary and Treasurer of the C. J. Dennis Society) and local Kallista reciter and C. J. Dennis aficionado Mac Craig.
The concert was intended primarily for the residents of Sunnyside Avenue. However, such was the enthusiasm of the local community that many people had to be turned away. There was clearly a large amount of curiosity about the history of "Sunnyside" in the minds of the residents of Kallista and the surrounding district, and a considerable enthusiasm for the idea of celebrating this important piece of their - indeed the nation's - cultural heritage.
A festival steering committee was formed - chaired by Maria Bohan - and their plans received a huge boost when the Dandenong Ranges Music Council (DRMC) received a grant from the Shire of Yarra Ranges.
In the lead-up to the festival, Jim Brown and Mac Craig held a poetry workshop at Kallista Primary School on 3rd August, and Mac recited a number of the poems from “The Sentimental Bloke” at Belgrave Library on 9th August.
The festival was launched on Friday evening at the Kallista Tea Rooms, to a capacity crowd of about seventy people. Guest speakers included Ray Yates, Chairman of the DRMC (and also Principal of Monbulk Primary School and past President of the Shire of Yarra Ranges), and Councillor Samantha Dunn, from the Lyster Ward. I gave a general overview of the "Sunnyside" story, and then Roberta Roberts (in the form of Gwen De Lacy) and Mrs Aeneas Gunn (in the form of Elisabeth Fensham) took to the stage to reminisce. They were beautifully assisted by two children, Aurora Stebbing and Broden Krause.
Jim Brown also entertained the crowd with a version of the Dennis poem "Buses", which he had put to music "a la Gilbert & Sullivan". (The poem tells the story of taking the buses to "Sunnyside" from the perspective of Garry and Roberta's son Frank, who did most of the work.)
Mac Craig also recited “The Play” from "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke".
The following morning, I gave a poetry workshop to a group of local school children in the Kallista Community House. This was followed by a poetry workshop for adults, given by Jim Brown and David Campbell. Both were well received.
The Kallista Market was being held very nearby, and also in the morning the local primary school choir sang a number of songs at the market based on poems from C. J. Dennis “Book for Kids”, put to music by world renowned Australian composer, Calvin Bowman. At noon, they also performed in the Kallista School Hall. At both performances, Mac Craig recited each of the poems before it was sung.
The Monbulk & District Historical Society also did a wonderful job to set up a display of photographs and other historic materials in a marquee at the market. Some of this display later moved to the Kallista Mechanics’ (community) Hall in the afternoon, to supplement the events which were held there. These were as follows.
At 4 pm there was a showing of the 1919 silent movie "The Sentimental Bloke", starring Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchert, and directed by Raymond Longford. Live music to accompany the film was provided by local musicians Katherine Macintosh (piano), Cecilia Dowling (violin) and Joshua Stillwell (viola). (Joshua composed and arranged the music for the film.)
The climax of the festival was the show on Saturday night. The hall is a wonderfully appropriate venue, as it was opened in 1914, the same year that Dennis was completing the Bloke. Indeed, it is said that Dennis himself played billiards in the hall.
I was asked to act as MC, and I began by re-capping the "Sunnyside" story, and talking a little about Frank Roberts. As well as taking the buses to "Sunnyside", and preparing Dennis' personal tramcar for his use, Frank became a good friend of Dennis, and serves as one of the models for the Sentimental Bloke. (The book finishes with "Bill" working as a berry farmer, like Frank.) Sadly, Frank was killed at the Battle of Mont St Quentin, a month before the Armistice, while his wife was still pregnant with their first child. Indeed, his name is listed on the Honour Roll on the wall of the hall. By sheer coincidence, the date of the concert, 1st September, marked the 94th anniversary of his death.
We were then treated to performances by Jim Brown and David Campbell. Jim performed "Dusk", another one of Dennis' poems to which Jim has composed a musical accompaniment, and Jim’s iconic piece, "The Anzac On The Wall" (which was very appropriate given the earlier discussion about Frank's death).
David performed his poem “It’s bloody ‘ard to be a bloke”, a look at how Bill might view his relationship with Doreen if they were both alive today. He then performed another of his poems, "The CJ Dennis So-ci-er-tee", which gave me a good excuse to talk about the upcoming Toolangi Festival. The poem had won first prize at the Toolangi Festival the previous year. (Dennis squatted for several years in a hut on the site of an abandoned mill in Toolangi prior to living at "Sunnyside". The success of "The Sentimental Bloke" allowed him to return to Toolangi, purchase this same property, and build a new house. Students of the life of C. J. Dennis often assume Toolangi and Kallista are very close to each other. In fact they are situated in separate mountain ranges, approximately 50 km apart, at opposite ends of the Yarra Valley.)
After a brief interval, Mac Craig took to the stage to recite (and I mean recite, not read!) nine of the 14 poems from "The Sentimental Bloke". I provided a commentary prior to each poem, in which I tried to tell the story of C. J. Dennis, and the story of the writing and publishing of "The Sentimental Bloke", as well as fill in some of the missing plot details from the five poems that Mac was not reciting.
Mac received a thunderous applause at the completion of his performance from the 80-strong audience.
Jim Brown then took to the stage once more to sing “Tanglefoot”, another C. J. Dennis poem for which he has provided a melody. He finished with an audience “singalong” to the classic Jack O’Hagan song, “The Road to Gundagai”. (Jim also passed on a fascinating anecdote about the writing of the song, told to him personally by O’Hagan. Apparently, it was inspired by his chance meeting of a ‘digger’, who had lost an arm, by the side of the road. The ‘digger’ was walking home, and O’Hagan gave him a lift...so the character walking home in the song is in fact a World War One veteran walking home after the War!)
Finally, Maria Bohan publicly acknowledged the many hard-working volunteers who had made the festival such a success, and a wonderful supper was provided, with food reminiscent of the times when "Sunnyside" was active as an "artists' colony".
Further acknowledgements are taken from the festival booklet, as follows:
Kay Craig (botanical artist - you can see some of her exquisite work on the web-site banner, which can be found here: http://www.sunnysiders.org.au/ )
Matthew Griffiths (web master)
Residents of Sunnyside Avenue, especially Gayle Kerr, Maureen Taylor, Jason and Melissa Fox
Yvonne DeLacy (historic research)
In short, the festival was judged by one and all as a resounding success. The question that now hangs in the air, of course...what next?
© Stephen Whiteside 06.09.2012
The inaugural "Sunnyside" Festival took place at Kallista (Victoria) this year on Friday 31st August and Saturday 1st September.
The festival takes its name from the property, "Sunnyside", purchased by arts patrons Garry and Roberta Roberts in 1910. The Roberts played host to a range of writers and artists at "Sunnyside", their most famous guest being the poet C. J. Dennis, who completed his masterpiece "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke" in a tramcar on their property in 1914. Garry Roberts was a senior executive of the Melbourne Tramway & Omnibus Company, and he arranged for obsolete horse-drawn omnibuses (they were being replaced by cable tram technology) to be placed in the paddocks around the "Sunnyside" homestead.
Other visitors to the original "Sunnyside" property included the cartoonists and illustrators Hal Gye and David Low, the artists Percy Leason, John Shirlow, Harold Herbert, Alick McClintock and M. J. McNally, the writer Mrs Aeneas Gunn, and the journalist Guy Innes. (It was Guy Innes who drove the English Poet Laureate John Masefield to Dennis' Toolangi home many years later, in 1934.)
Garry Roberts died in 1933. "Sunnyside" was sold shortly after, and the house burnt down in 1935. Roberta Roberts died in 1936. The property has since been subdivided, with the area extensively re-planted in the 1930s. There is now a range of private properties on either side of Sunnyside Avenue on the site of the Roberts' original property.
The festival arose spontaneously from a house concert hosted by Maria Bohan and Adrian Evans in February this year to celebrate the legacy of “Sunnyside”. Performers on that night were myself, poet and reciter Jim Brown (who is also Secretary and Treasurer of the C. J. Dennis Society) and local Kallista reciter and C. J. Dennis aficionado Mac Craig.
The concert was intended primarily for the residents of Sunnyside Avenue. However, such was the enthusiasm of the local community that many people had to be turned away. There was clearly a large amount of curiosity about the history of "Sunnyside" in the minds of the residents of Kallista and the surrounding district, and a considerable enthusiasm for the idea of celebrating this important piece of their - indeed the nation's - cultural heritage.
A festival steering committee was formed - chaired by Maria Bohan - and their plans received a huge boost when the Dandenong Ranges Music Council (DRMC) received a grant from the Shire of Yarra Ranges.
In the lead-up to the festival, Jim Brown and Mac Craig held a poetry workshop at Kallista Primary School on 3rd August, and Mac recited a number of the poems from “The Sentimental Bloke” at Belgrave Library on 9th August.
The festival was launched on Friday evening at the Kallista Tea Rooms, to a capacity crowd of about seventy people. Guest speakers included Ray Yates, Chairman of the DRMC (and also Principal of Monbulk Primary School and past President of the Shire of Yarra Ranges), and Councillor Samantha Dunn, from the Lyster Ward. I gave a general overview of the "Sunnyside" story, and then Roberta Roberts (in the form of Gwen De Lacy) and Mrs Aeneas Gunn (in the form of Elisabeth Fensham) took to the stage to reminisce. They were beautifully assisted by two children, Aurora Stebbing and Broden Krause.
Jim Brown also entertained the crowd with a version of the Dennis poem "Buses", which he had put to music "a la Gilbert & Sullivan". (The poem tells the story of taking the buses to "Sunnyside" from the perspective of Garry and Roberta's son Frank, who did most of the work.)
Mac Craig also recited “The Play” from "The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke".
The following morning, I gave a poetry workshop to a group of local school children in the Kallista Community House. This was followed by a poetry workshop for adults, given by Jim Brown and David Campbell. Both were well received.
The Kallista Market was being held very nearby, and also in the morning the local primary school choir sang a number of songs at the market based on poems from C. J. Dennis “Book for Kids”, put to music by world renowned Australian composer, Calvin Bowman. At noon, they also performed in the Kallista School Hall. At both performances, Mac Craig recited each of the poems before it was sung.
The Monbulk & District Historical Society also did a wonderful job to set up a display of photographs and other historic materials in a marquee at the market. Some of this display later moved to the Kallista Mechanics’ (community) Hall in the afternoon, to supplement the events which were held there. These were as follows.
At 4 pm there was a showing of the 1919 silent movie "The Sentimental Bloke", starring Lottie Lyell and Arthur Tauchert, and directed by Raymond Longford. Live music to accompany the film was provided by local musicians Katherine Macintosh (piano), Cecilia Dowling (violin) and Joshua Stillwell (viola). (Joshua composed and arranged the music for the film.)
The climax of the festival was the show on Saturday night. The hall is a wonderfully appropriate venue, as it was opened in 1914, the same year that Dennis was completing the Bloke. Indeed, it is said that Dennis himself played billiards in the hall.
I was asked to act as MC, and I began by re-capping the "Sunnyside" story, and talking a little about Frank Roberts. As well as taking the buses to "Sunnyside", and preparing Dennis' personal tramcar for his use, Frank became a good friend of Dennis, and serves as one of the models for the Sentimental Bloke. (The book finishes with "Bill" working as a berry farmer, like Frank.) Sadly, Frank was killed at the Battle of Mont St Quentin, a month before the Armistice, while his wife was still pregnant with their first child. Indeed, his name is listed on the Honour Roll on the wall of the hall. By sheer coincidence, the date of the concert, 1st September, marked the 94th anniversary of his death.
We were then treated to performances by Jim Brown and David Campbell. Jim performed "Dusk", another one of Dennis' poems to which Jim has composed a musical accompaniment, and Jim’s iconic piece, "The Anzac On The Wall" (which was very appropriate given the earlier discussion about Frank's death).
David performed his poem “It’s bloody ‘ard to be a bloke”, a look at how Bill might view his relationship with Doreen if they were both alive today. He then performed another of his poems, "The CJ Dennis So-ci-er-tee", which gave me a good excuse to talk about the upcoming Toolangi Festival. The poem had won first prize at the Toolangi Festival the previous year. (Dennis squatted for several years in a hut on the site of an abandoned mill in Toolangi prior to living at "Sunnyside". The success of "The Sentimental Bloke" allowed him to return to Toolangi, purchase this same property, and build a new house. Students of the life of C. J. Dennis often assume Toolangi and Kallista are very close to each other. In fact they are situated in separate mountain ranges, approximately 50 km apart, at opposite ends of the Yarra Valley.)
After a brief interval, Mac Craig took to the stage to recite (and I mean recite, not read!) nine of the 14 poems from "The Sentimental Bloke". I provided a commentary prior to each poem, in which I tried to tell the story of C. J. Dennis, and the story of the writing and publishing of "The Sentimental Bloke", as well as fill in some of the missing plot details from the five poems that Mac was not reciting.
Mac received a thunderous applause at the completion of his performance from the 80-strong audience.
Jim Brown then took to the stage once more to sing “Tanglefoot”, another C. J. Dennis poem for which he has provided a melody. He finished with an audience “singalong” to the classic Jack O’Hagan song, “The Road to Gundagai”. (Jim also passed on a fascinating anecdote about the writing of the song, told to him personally by O’Hagan. Apparently, it was inspired by his chance meeting of a ‘digger’, who had lost an arm, by the side of the road. The ‘digger’ was walking home, and O’Hagan gave him a lift...so the character walking home in the song is in fact a World War One veteran walking home after the War!)
Finally, Maria Bohan publicly acknowledged the many hard-working volunteers who had made the festival such a success, and a wonderful supper was provided, with food reminiscent of the times when "Sunnyside" was active as an "artists' colony".
Further acknowledgements are taken from the festival booklet, as follows:
Kay Craig (botanical artist - you can see some of her exquisite work on the web-site banner, which can be found here: http://www.sunnysiders.org.au/ )
Matthew Griffiths (web master)
Residents of Sunnyside Avenue, especially Gayle Kerr, Maureen Taylor, Jason and Melissa Fox
Yvonne DeLacy (historic research)
In short, the festival was judged by one and all as a resounding success. The question that now hangs in the air, of course...what next?
