Rada Priya

For years, I had noticed the unfinished house beyond Tyalgum. Set against the valley, it looked both permanent and incomplete: a broad timber structure overlooking Wollumbin, ambitious enough to draw the eye and unfinished enough to invite questions. Then I met the woman who built it. Visitors reach Shirley Kennedy ’ s home across sheets of plywood laid over the mud and enter from the side. Across the opening where a formal entrance may one day stand, two large paintings she made while studying art slide into place as protection from the weather. Inside, reclaimed hardwood beams hold one immense room filled with books, pottery, canvases, photographs, newspaper clippings and preserved catalogues. The house is home, studio, workshop and archive. Its contents are abundant, but not accidental. Shirley knows what she has and why it matters. Her own path into art was hard won. The seventh of nine children in a farming family, she recalls being told that art was “ a joke”. She did not ente...

For most of my life, womanhood has felt like a series of thresholds I crossed without the right kind of witness. At forty, I have met a woman who makes me curious about the next one. Sharon Moloney approached me last November at an ArtPost exhibition opening. She had seen me around the village with my daughters, she said, and enjoyed watching the way I interacted with them. Something had drawn her to introduce herself. Ordinarily, being told that a stranger had been watching me with my children might have raised my defences. But Sharon’s presence was calm and uncomplicated. I did not feel watched. I felt seen. She invited my girls and me to swim in the creek at her Smiths Creek home and share tea. Something made me accept. I learned that Sharon had spent decades working in women’s health, completed a PhD in women’s spirituality and written a book. On Christmas Day, she came by simply to slip a card beneath my door. It was a lovely new friendship. I did not yet understand it as an inter...

This week, my 100th article was published in  The Tweed Valley Weekly . But the number sent me back to the first time I walked into its office, when I still didn’t know whether my first two stories were good enough to print. I had filed them under deadline a couple of days earlier and was there to meet editor Jonathan Howard for the first time. It happened to be print day. That week’s layout had been decided the day before, distribution was the following morning and work on the next edition was already underway. I hadn’t yet learned that newspapers seem to exist in several weeks at once. Jonathan looked at me and said, “I recognise you. You’ll be in the paper tomorrow.” I assumed he meant a small mention somewhere inside. The following morning, I was the front-page story . I had walked into the office wondering whether I belonged behind a byline, only to discover the paper had already placed me on its cover. Journalism had never been part of my plan. I was finishing a Diploma of Fa...

I went to meet Scott McDougall deliberately underprepared. This is not how journalists are usually meant to begin. We are supposed to research, cross-check, read the biography, study the exhibition history, arrive with neat questions and enough knowledge to sound vaguely authoritative. But Scott had been recommended to me by artist Hobie Porter, who told me he was someone I might find interesting. That was enough. I did not want to arrive with the internet’s version of him already sitting between us. I wanted to meet the man, see the work, stand in the room where it happened and absorb it without the corruption of other people’s opinions. I am not an art writer. Not really. But I am an artist at heart. A fashion designer by training. A lover of light, texture, form, fabric, structure, composition and the controlled drama of a perfectly judged line. Becoming a journalist has opened a new lens. It has also made me realise how often I underestimate people. My general disappointment in hum...

CEDAR CREEK, Australia - The road to Hobie Porter’s studio winds through dense green, the kind of layered rainforest that seems to breathe. It is quiet in a way that feels deliberate, as if the landscape is holding something back. Porter has built a career on that exact tension. I had known of Hobie Porter long before I knew him personally. His sweeping landscapes hanging at Tweed Regional Gallery had stopped me in my tracks. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise he was the same person I saw regularly at my daily café, Bastion Lane in Uki. For more than two decades, Porter has painted the Tweed Valley - its escarpments, shifting light and familiar outlines - but rarely in ways that feel settled. His works resist the easy beauty often associated with landscape painting. Instead, they hover somewhere between recognition and unease, inviting viewers to look again at places they thought they understood. “I’m trying to present a fresh perspective of something people are familiar...

There are people we grieve twice in a lifetime. Once for who they were. And once for who we were never allowed to know. My father is one of them. When I was a child, my mother told me he was a paedophile. She didn’t whisper it. She didn’t hesitate. She said it plainly, as fact. As warning. As control. When we misbehaved, she would drop us at the greyhound station and force us to spend sleepless weekends with him. I remember the noise of the station. The way my stomach would knot. The terror that would sit in my chest at night when the lights went out. I was absolutely terrified to sleep. He was a workaholic. Twelve-hour days. Long hours. Absence disguised as provision. He would leave cash on the bench, stockpiles of food in the fridge, and the television on - a wild luxury I couldn’t enjoy because fear had already moved in. At home with my mother, we weren’t allowed a TV at all. Looking back now, my father was unemotional, but never unkind. He didn’t ask questions. He didn’t offer hims...