Ballarat centre builds on Sovereign Hill success
A centre in Ballarat is reviving creative skills and trades not seen since the gold rush days.
On a cloudy day in the former gold rush city of Ballarat, just over 100km northwest of Melbourne, I step inside the Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades. Several women sit by an expansive glass wall, silently feeding raw wool into foot-powered spinning wheels. The window, framing nearby verdant hills, allows natural light to stream in, as do sections of glass ceiling. Handmade ceramic cups for hot drinks and a local baker’s tempting cakes await this morning’s workshoppers.
I’m not here to spin wool but to make corn dollies. They are neither dolls nor corn, at least as Australians understand those words, but decorative plaited harvest knots created using cereal crops. It’s one of many traditional skills taught at the centre, which celebrates its first birthday in November.
Its workshops, which can run for a few hours or three days, cover everything from making Viking spears and wooden spoons to Chinese embroidery. These skills may be obscure, but the Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades makes sense in this UNESCO Creative City of Crafts and Folk Art. The centre stands beside Sovereign Hill, the 15ha open-air museum that takes visitors back to Victoria’s 1850s gold rush, and both are operated by the same association.
I watch traditional skills in action and in context at the long-running tourist attraction (it opened in 1970), where wheelwrights work in a factory powered by steam, and glistening blobs of sugary stuff are hand-stretched to make boiled lollies.
Ballarat has long considered itself a creative place, as the array of public art suggests. From the 19th-century classical marble statues in the botanical gardens to the city’s latest colourful mural commissions, there are more than 120 examples. I explore this civic-minded artistry on four self-guided walks using informative maps available from the visitor centre and the Creative Ballarat website.
Until October 22, there is even more public art to discover either side of a crafty workshop. Many of the 10th Ballarat International Foto Biennale’s 2000 photographic works are displayed in public places, including on digital screens and light boxes on Alfred Deakin Place and Unicorn Lane.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, so to speak, the Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades’ operations manager, artist Deborah Klein, welcomes the small group of would-be corn-dolly makers.
“Thanks for being adventurous and coming along with us on the journey,” she says. That journey is about supporting and sustaining the practice of rare trades and old crafts, says Klein: “We’re building a community of makers and people who appreciate things that are made by hand; things of beauty and purpose.”
We move into one of seven specially built studios, each dedicated to a discipline such as metal, wood, leather or textiles, and meet corn-dolly expert Elizabeth Woodroofe. A member of the Guild of Straw Craftsmen in her native Britain, she learnt this ancient skill from her mother. Woodroofe shows us a photo of her making corn dollies as a girl in a 1960s book on the subject.
Using dried wheat stems she has soaked in water to make them pliable, she patiently demonstrates three techniques: plaiting with two, five or six stems, following different combinations of folding clockwise and anti-clockwise. It takes some getting used to, but we soon have the rhythm, then twist and tie the plaits into pretty shapes and embellish them with dainty ribbons, dried flowers and seed heads.
After three hours I have a new old skill and three cute little corn dollies. The process is meditative and satisfying, and the centre calm and encouraging, so I’m pondering the Christmas corn dollies workshop (November 18). Or perhaps something more challenging.
Klein adds new options to the schedule every week, with more to come in 2024, including blacksmithing using the just-commissioned coke forge. If the past is a foreign country, as British novelist L.P. Hartley wrote, the Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades issues the visa.
Patricia Maunder was a guest of Visit Victoria.
