House debates

Tuesday, 26 October 2010

Adjournment

Robertson Electorate: Arts Community

10:14 pm

Photo of Deborah O'NeillDeborah O'Neill (Robertson, Australian Labor Party) Share this | | Hansard source

We are all blessed to work in a dynamic workplace that is full of drama. That is probably a good thing at 10.15 at night. Most of us in this place thrive on it. I would like to pay tribute tonight to those people on the Central Coast who put drama into our lives and who would like to put in a bit more. Drama in its many forms enhances our understandings of life.

On Saturday week the Friends of the Performing Arts Precinct will hold their annual general meeting at the Central Coast Leagues Club in Gosford. The Friends were very active during the recent federal election campaign, and they are enthusiastically backing, as I do, the development of a regional performing arts centre in Gosford. The Friends have a grand vision that encompasses an acoustic concert hall, a new conservatorium and a regional auditorium, and those familiar with the Gosford waterfront would realise that the Central Coast Leagues Club is in fact well situated to provide an iconic location for such a centre in the future. Gosford City Council has given the project in principle support and is working to finalise the design and costings. I will be watching this performance closely.

The vibrant performing arts community on the Central Coast deserves a boost. In the seat of Robertson we have a wonderful musical society, the Gosford Music Society, as well as the Laycock Street Theatre, the Woy Woy Little Theatre and the Mad Cow Theatre Company. We also have NAISDA, the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association, Australia’s national tertiary Indigenous dance training organisation. These community theatre and dance groups are core parts of our community. They tell our stories, they tell others’ stories and they help us to relax, think and imagine. These are some of the gifts that the arts bring to our lives. I hope during my time as the member for Robertson I can go some way to advancing the cause of the performing arts on the Central Coast and give its friends the kind of boost they are yearning for.

Tonight I would also like to pay tribute—to shine an usher’s torchlight, as it were—on another Central Coast icon in our arts community, the Avoca Beach picture theatre. Nearly every local person and many of our tourist visitors from Sydney and beyond will have experienced watching a film there at some time in the last 50 years or so. Just a stone’s throw from the beautiful and famous Avoca Beach, the theatre has been in operation since 1951, when it was built by the Hunter family. Currently it is owned and operated by Beth and Norman Hunter, who have reinvigorated it. They provide wonderful access to a wide range of film art and other forms of dramatic art. If you took a trip to Avoca Beach picture theatre, Mr Speaker, you could find yourself stepping back in time to a bygone era, transported by the luxury of rich red velvet and dimming wall lights as the screen curtains draw and we move into a place where we suspend disbelief and invest in the stories that flicker across the screen in front of us.

I have to say that the challenge to see past the limitations of the building in the 1980s, when my husband and I first moved up to the Central Coast, was a much more challenging task before the refurbishments of the 1990s, when the theatre was refitted. I am envious of the mums and bubs sessions, which were not available when I was raising my kids. Sharing a film with other mums and connecting with them before and after is a very appealing idea and a great way to build social capital. In recent years the range of options about what can be seen, experienced, and learned at the Avoca Beach picture theatre has been impressive indeed.

The theatre not only has major releases; it screens foreign films, independent releases and even films of opera productions from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Most recently Beth and Norman offered up film of the UK’s National Theatre Live, including works by Shakespeare. To this range of options the Avoca Beach theatre also offers patrons the chance to see live drama and live music and to hire a venue. You can even hold your wedding at the cinema, as one of my former students did. On the first Tuesday in November, Melbourne Cup Day revellers will be enjoying a screening of the Marx BrothersA Day at the Racesof course. The theatre also provides a venue for budding local filmmakers. The Coasties short film festival offers a chance for young and old to record our own time and tell our own stories about our lives and our region. There is also an annual Indigenous film festival and of course the obligatory surf film festival.

In addition to what one can see and experience when the lights go down in our Central Coast town, there is the Avoca Film Group. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Elaine Odgers Norling, who has been the facilitator of the Avoca Film Group for over five years. Elaine is a great community activist. She understands the capacity of film and the arts to lift and enable us to envision new ways of living, being and thinking.

I began my speech speaking of the drama of this place as the source of my selection of this element of life. I look forward to attending many more wonderful movies at the Avoca Beach picture theatre and I honour the work of Beth and Norman Hunter.