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...