The Gallery You Can Resort To For Fine Art
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday November 24, 1994
IN THE small spa resort town of Daylesford, in central Victoria, there is an art and craft gallery that is attracting visitors at an astonishing average of 3,500 a week.
Of course it is bigger than the usual run of resort art and craft shop: a three-storey former convent and boarding school that's brimming with products of varying artistic endeavour costing from a couple of dollars to thousands. And you can have lunch in its award-winning eatery.
The Convent Gallery was built initially in the gold-boom days of the 1860s as a home for the district's gold commissioner. The Catholic Church succeeded mammon, buying the house for a presbytery, but decided in 1891 that the priest, "being denied many things that were conducive to comfort", should have a new home.
Presumably no-one took it amiss that the building was nonetheless considered appropriate for nuns and schoolgirl boarders, a role it fulfilled, expanding the premises, until 1975, when the Anglican Church bought it for a clergy retreat.
Coincidentally, 1975 was the year that Tina Banitska, who had come from Greece with her family in the 1950s, first saw the Holy Cross Convent and School high on Wombat Hill in Daylesford and told herself: "One day that is going to be the most beautiful gallery in Australia."
Tina, who holds a degree in teaching and a diploma in fine arts, was then working in Ballarat as an art consultant. The planned retreat did not eventuate. Tina brought her dream to fruition.
The imposing building had deteriorated and its once grand gardens had run wild when it was put out to tender in 1989, with a request from the Church that it be used for a purpose with community benefit. Tina is confident that her proposal for turning the building into a people-friendly gallery while retaining examples of its former life played a big part in her tender being accepted.
Then came a couple of years of hard work, bills for $1 million and the need to jolly along impatient bank managers before her concept could be made public. It was clearly welcome: 5,000 turned up to see it the weekend it opened.
Somewhere around 70 per cent of what's on show at the Convent Gallery is produced by artists and people of many skills within central Victoria. They start at a few dollars: decorative candles, greeting cards, flower essences, beads ... gift shop stuff.
You find them on the ground floor amid a cornucopia of things attractive and artistic, whether wrought in iron or gold, jewellery or timber, leather, ceramics, pearls or cloth. The displays are of artistic delight in themselves, often scattered with aesthetic cunning onto complementary or contrasting backgrounds.
Here you can find gifts, or something that might liven up that nook in your own home, beginning in the $30 region and going into hundreds.
Walk upstairs to the first floor and the price rises with you. Here the atmosphere is closer to that of a commercial art gallery. There were a couple of Pro Harts on offer when I was there, and no lack of imaginative sculpture. Exhibitions are changed monthly.
The top floor follows the same pattern, though some of the nuns' cells have been used to display exhibits and one is in its original state, its simple bed, washstand and prie-dieu an austere shock among such sumptuous adornment of person and property.
Inevitably the Convent Gallery has won an armful of tourism awards, plus one for its landscaped grounds, one for the chef and one for Tina Banitska for the best business in Victoria run by a woman.
* The Convent Gallery is at Daly Street, Daylesford, Victoria 3460 (follow the signs), which is on the Midland Highway between Castlemaine and Ballarat, and is known for its mineral water springs and baths. The gallery is open daily from 10 am to 6 pm, with the C afe at the C onvent opening at 9 am on Sundays for "Mediterranean" breakfast. Telephone: (053) 48 3211.
© 1994 Sydney Morning Herald