By Callum Ludwig
Grace Cooper, a Year 11 student at Little Yarra Steiner School, has had the opportunity to showcase her art skills in her first public art commission.
Grace is from Yarra Junction, and has been drawing since she was young and will now be memorialising Dunolly’s Women Puddlers as part of the Dunolly Women’s Historical Art Trail, an Augmented Reality art trail memorialising remarkable women from the Gold Rush era.
Grace said the opportunity is pretty exciting.
“I’ve tried to put my artwork out there a little bit, and I’m really into history, so being able to learn about it through this is really cool,” she said.
“It’d be really fun to continue to have these opportunities because it doesn’t feel like work. Working in art or photography would be really cool to pursue.”
Puddlers were a machine pioneered on the Victorian goldfields in 1854, developed as an affordable way of processing gold-bearing clay on a large scale. Dunolly in today’s age is a rural village of approximately 800 people 50km west of Bendigo and 150 km northwest of Melbourne. Louise Cooper, Grace’s half-sister, is the lead facilitating artist and programmer of the project and said Grace came as a natural choice.
“Grace is experimenting with hand-drawn watercolour animation to create her artwork and it is so great to be able to support young emerging artists through this project,” she said.
“These women have been mostly forgotten from history for the mere fact of being born female, and the Dunolly Women’s Historical Art Trail will be a great way for families to get out of the house together and enjoy hunting down relics of history, akin to Dunolly’s still favourite past time of metal detecting in the insatiable lust for gold, waving their smart devices through Dunolly’s main street in search of the locations where these amazing women were born, lived or worked.”
Some of the inspirational women of Dunolly include Wander the first person in the world to write a detective novel from the detective’s perspective, Euphemia Baker the first female to pass Matriculation Examination in Victoria and Eliza Ellen Russell the first person to sew the Australian flag.
Grace said it is quite important for young artists to get these opportunities to display their work.
“I never would have been able to do this if Lou hadn’t contacted me about it, or potentially even thought about it,” she said.
“Before this, it was really just a hobby, as it didn’t seem like it could be more than that.”
Outside of the project, Grace has four horses, which are often the focus of her own personal artwork.
The launch of the trail is on Saturday 17 September 5-8pm at Dunolly’s Welcome Stranger Cafe, and the trail will be a free tourism experience throughout the September school holidays and at low cost perpetually thereafter.
The project was made possible thanks to funding from Regional Arts Australia’s Regional Arts Fund administered by Regional Arts Victoria and a community partnership grant from Community Bank Maldon and District.
