The personal touch

WE are on the road from Launceston to Hobart, driving under a grey, sullen sky, when Elizabeth Walsh makes an urgent stop.

Elizabeth Walsh

WE are on the road from Launceston to Hobart, driving under a grey, sullen sky past wheat-coloured grass paddocks and voluptuous rolling hills, when Elizabeth Walsh makes an urgent stop.

It's midsummer and raining insistently when Walsh gets out of the car to deliver posters to a fish and chip shop in Campbell Town, a wool-growing and tourist centre with an abundance of retirees and convict-built buildings. As Walsh talks up a storm inside the unprepossessing shop, the publicist travelling with her says quietly: "I think it's fairly rare for an artistic director to do a poster delivery. In fact, I've never seen it."

"Oh, the glamour!" Walsh deadpans as she climbs back into the driver's seat after delivering the posters. You could be forgiven for forgetting that this wisecracking dame with the fire engine-red nails and penchant for wearing black is the same woman who is overseeing Tasmania's largest arts event -- the $4 million Ten Days on the Island festival, which opens next week.

Indeed, Walsh is to this biennial, state-wide festival what Bill Clinton was to political campaigning: she has an effortless rapport with those she needs to cultivate, from senior artists whose works are held by the National Gallery of Australia to people who may never have been to an art gallery. Today, Walsh will be on the road for almost 12 hours as she gives Review a preview of some of the work and locations that feature in her 2011 program.

This year, Ten Days will unspool across the island state in 62 locations. It will involve 450 artists and more than 200 events, including several in Campbell Town (hence the poster delivery). With the Ten Days logo stamped on its doors and matching numberplates, the company car is hard to miss, as is the woman behind the wheel: Walsh is a large, gregarious woman with loose, blonde curls and an earthy sense of humour.

"I won't drive through the cemetery, that would be a bit tacky," she says, thinking out loud about a potential shortcut. "A helicopter, I so want a helicopter!" she mock wails as we drive through a lowering sky into and out the other side of a rain storm.

Clearly, Ten Days is not your average high-end arts festival. For one thing, Walsh gets down and dirty at the grassroots: as part of our two-day road trip she joins volunteers who work at the Entally estate, one of Tasmania's finest historic homes, for a crash course in radical, modern art. The course is aimed at preparing the volunteers for a Ten Days exhibit, a digital art installation that will be overlaid on Entally's painstakingly preserved colonial kitchen, with its boxy servants' staircase and cave-sized fireplace.

But many of the middle-aged and elderly volunteers are sceptical, hostile even, about the works they are shown.

"Give me the desperate romantics!" demands one. Walsh remains unfazed, quietly answering the teacher's questions and taking part in a group exercise involving butcher's paper and felt-tip pens.

Hours before, the festival boss had run the gauntlet of six brawling pugs as she visited landscape artist Michael McWilliams at his 1820s coach house in Perth. She was visiting McWilliams to check on the progress of a stunning, cautionary landscape that will be replicated on a roadside billboard for the festival, and greets him -- and the pugs -- as if they are bosom buddies. "Elizabeth, say hello to Elizabeth!" she says, eyeballing a squat, snuffling dog that shares her name and sniffs her toes.

Ten Days is nothing if not geographically ambitious: from established theatres and weatherboard community halls it will reach into most corners of Tasmania, from Launceston and Hobart to the hard-scrabble mining town of Queenstown; from popular tourist sites such as Port Arthur and Cradle Mountain to less well-trodden destinations such as King and Bruny islands.

Now in its 11th year, this festival is further distinguished by its quirky, organising principle. Founded by Robyn Archer, it comprises works by artists who live on islands, from Haiti to Hawaii, Tahiti to Tassie. It thus sets itself apart from the mainland's arts festivals and cannily taps into Tasmanians' deeply ingrained sense of themselves as non-mainlanders, a people defined by their state's isolation and ocean-fringed geography. Walsh admits: "There've been many attempts [by detractors] to argue that the statewide thing doesn't work -- well they're wrong; to argue that the island theme doesn't work -- well they're wrong." She says this with sudden ferocity, drawing out the "o" in "wrong".

Her voice softens and she adds: "There's actually a whole range of things about this festival that make it really special, not just in Australia but around the globe."

This will be Walsh's third and final program for Ten Days. During her 5 1/2-year stint as artistic director she has travelled as far afield as Iceland and Reunion Island, near Madagascar, to gather works for her programs. She is quick to disabuse Review of any suggestion she has access to skybeds and French champagne, pointing out she always travels "cattle class". "I try to squeeze everything out of it [travel] I can get . . . but it's not a lot of glamour, if I could just add," she says archly.

Among the imported highlights for this year's festival is a Singaporean stage adaptation of George Orwell's Animal Farm and Canada's Dance Marathon, part endurance test, part knockout, in which amateur dancers compete until only a champion couple is left standing. (Canada may not be an island but Dance Marathon also has links with Manhattan.) From Tahiti come award-winning documentaries about life in Oceania. Transplanted from Britain -- and seen at the Sydney Festival earlier this year -- is Power Plant, a sound and light installation featuring shadowy projections, brash electronic stunts and starbursts of colour, to be set in Hobart's Botanical Gardens. Walsh regards this as the program's most ambitious work in the sense that "we're looking to bring a large audience out into the open in the autumn. Some might say it's foolhardy but it's such a beautiful work."

The award-winning Chronicles of Long Kesh, from Dublin's Green Shoot Productions, is a tragicomic portrait of life on the inside of Northern Ireland's notorious Long Kesh or Maze Prison. It's set during the 1981 hunger strikes staged by Bobby Sands and other political prisoners. Walsh notes there are striking parallels between this work and Australia's colonial history, including our experience of harsh penal colonies and the large numbers of Irish convicts transported to our shores. "When you start to scratch the surface and really dive in, there is a whole world of connections," she says.

Ten Days is also about showcasing local talent. Melbourne's Chamber Made Opera will work with locals on the wild but beautiful Bruny Island to knit a labyrinthine prop and stage a partly reconstructed opera, Monteverdi's 1608 work, L'Arianna. Walsh feels one of her biggest achievements at Ten Days has been embedding artists in communities where people may never go to the theatre or opera: "The experience of having really great artists engaging with school kids on Bruny or King islands . . . all of those things lead to a whole range of layers that is more than just the exchange of 'I bought a ticket and I'll go along'."

At the Port Arthur World Heritage site, Melbourne's Strange Fruit will play a set of tuned bells while perched on 5m poles, while in Hobart Hidden Republic will see the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra team up with leading indigenous band the Black Arm Band and singers including Jimmy Little and Archie Roach.

A recurring festival favourite is Far Flung Flicks, a mobile cinema that will visit nine towns this year and screen Tasmanian and Irish short films. John Kelly runs Hobart's State cinema, Tasmania's only art-house cinema, and every two years goes on the road for Ten Days. With a collapsible film screen and a sound system and digital projectors that fit into Kelly's car, the mobile cinema will travel from town to town, offering a menu of short films Tasmanians wouldn't otherwise see. Indeed, some of the towns Kelly visits do not have cinemas. "This year we are going to the four corners of the state and to points in between," says Kelly, who programmed the Irish films in this year's line-up. "It's reminiscent of the days of the travelling picture-show man. There is a real nostalgia about what I do. You go into these draughty halls, you set up and there is certain magic to it."

Walsh jokes she is an expert on where to get Tasmania's best pies, pink-eyed potatoes or organic legs of lamb. After criss-crossing the state for Ten Days for more than a decade, she has come to know the island intimately. Take her footy barometer. Walsh reckons that if a Tasmanian town is doing well, its AFL oval will be well-kept. But if the oval is parched, neglected and has no stadium, that is a sign the town is in trouble.

Given Tasmania is Australia's least prosperous state, Walsh says the biggest challenge about planning Ten Days is getting the right fit between artist and place. "The biggest challenge is making sure that the work you're bringing in to those communities is right for the place . . . There's no point trying to fix a round peg into a square hole." (The festival is also designed to appeal to tourists, who account for 20 per cent of ticket sales.)

As this year's event will be Walsh's swan song, it marks the end of an era. She has been with the festival since 2000, when it was founded by the high-profile Archer. Walsh was executive producer before she succeeded Archer as artistic director in 2005. Last month, it was announced that Jo Duffy, Darwin Festival's artistic director, will be Walsh's successor. Walsh doesn't yet have another job lined up; she is planning lots of holidays to compensate for those she has missed out on.

Before she joined Ten Days, Walsh, 51, trained at the Victorian College of the Arts and took on management roles at the Flying Fruit Fly Circus, Sydney Opera House Trust and the Sydney Festival. Still, when she was appointed to Ten Days's top job she lacked Archer's national profile and her promotion raised eyebrows.

Yet she has cemented the event's reputation as the little festival that could.

Its audiences more than doubled from 93,000 in 2001 to 195,000 in 2009. Walsh says a KPMG analysis of the 2009 festival found it injected $25.4m into the local economy. "Not a bad ninefold return there," she boasts, referring to the $2.8m in state funding and sponsorship the festival attracts. (The rest of its $4m budget comes from ticket sales and one-off grants.)

This year, much of the visual art featured in her program tackles environmental themes. This is intriguing, given that an environmental controversy once threatened to derail Ten Days. The dispute arose when the Tasmanian government's logging arm, Forestry Tasmania, signed up as a key sponsor of the 2003 festival. Led by award-winning novelist Richard Flanagan, many artists boycotted the festival and an associated $40,000 literary award because they believed this sponsorship was unethical. It was a bitter and prolonged dispute. Then premier Jim Bacon accused the activists of behaving like "cultural fascists".

I ask Walsh what she thinks of that remark. "How could I agree or disagree with that one?" she says, clearly nonplussed. She camouflages her discomfit with laughter, adding: "I think you'd find that the political landscape has shifted a long way since that time and, while we can laugh about it now, it certainly didn't feel like a laughing matter back then." Little wonder Walsh believes that having a robust sense of humour "is fairly essential in this business because I think you'd have an ulcer otherwise.

"It's not for the faint of heart."

The following day we are on the road again. We are going to meet Gay Hawkes, a sculptor, carpenter and grandmother who works out of a boat shed flayed by the stiff breezes of Blackman Bay, about 60km from Hobart. Hawkes lives in Dunalley, a tiny village with a self-described "interesting" gift shop and fleet of compact fishing boats.

For the festival, Hawkes is to convert Dunalley's community hall into the Dunalley Calico Museum. She has made the cabinets and shelving, as well as the artworks to go in them, and is effectively creating a one-woman museum.

Her studio is an Aladdin's cave of found objects and artworks: here a bucket of whale vertebrae, there a bra made of tanned chicken feet. She does her own tanning and carpentry, and is renowned for her bush furniture made from found bits of wood.

Her output is mind-bogglingly eclectic. Her "museum" will feature flower sculptures made from scallop shells -- Walsh is very taken with those -- delicately sculpted cuttlefish shells and painted calico banners.

Hawkes shows us a mannequin sporting a skirt threaded with horsehair and her own hair, and a midnight-blue shark skin she scored from a fisherman and tanned. Walsh teases the artist, asking whether there is any animal whose hide she wouldn't tan. Hawkes replies airily that (protected species aside) there isn't.

Wearing a fitted T-shirt pitted with holes, Hawkes cooks a delicious lunch of locally caught seafood, stuffed eggs from her chooks, two types of homemade bread and glossy blackberries picked from just outside the studio door. This sense of thrift, of making use of whatever is to hand, inspires her bush furniture and sculptures and was instilled during her childhood. "My mother told me that if you need anything other than a piano, you make it . . . you don't need to go to the shop to do anything."

Hawkes, whose works are held by the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House in Canberra, says "an island gives you the journey because an island drives you crackers". She means that while she enjoys working in her idyllic boat shed, her sense of isolation drives her to seek adventures.

She has lived and worked in remote indigenous communities and on a boat, and taught brain-damaged jail inmates, to stretch herself and her art.

For Walsh, Hawkes's found-object sculptures reflect the homespun texture and feel of Ten Days: "This festival has engaged with ideas that are inspiring and innovative and aren't about, necessarily, a demonstration of having a big wallet."

Back in the car, I ask her how it will feel to leave the festival. "It'll be fantastic!" she says with a sudden roar of laughter. "It's been the most incredibly intense and rewarding experience, but it's also wonderful to see that the festival is all grown up, that it is actually established; that audiences and communities anticipate its arrival every two years and also that it has a firm footing -- it's not like it will disappear."

Ten Days on the Island runs at various Tasmanian locations from March 25 to April 3.