Armidale

Thursday 19 February 2026
THE MANY FACES OF MARGARET OLLEY: ARTIST, SITTER & PATRON
Presented by Anne Harbers (Australia)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

Margaret Olley, born in 1923 was a well -recognised Australian artist, holding over 90 solo exhibitions in her lifetime. She was the subject of William Dobell’s Archibald winning portrait in 1948 and again in 2011 for Ben Quilty only months before her death.  Over her lifetime she was a significant philanthropist to numerous Australian art galleries – both in capital cities and regional centres. Her studio from her Paddington home is now re-created as the Margaret Olley Art Centre at the Tweed Regional Gallery in Murwillumbah.  This talk will explore her art and her legacy.

Anne is an independent art historian and lecturer focusing on European and Australian artists. She received her Master’s in Art History from the University of Sydney in 2014 and now spends part of each year in The Netherlands working on her doctorate. Her current research delves into 17th century Dutch art, and European Art and Decorative Arts. She has published works on collecting, art and science, and lectured widely in Australia, Europe and the USA.

Thursday 12 March 2026
THE BRILLIANCE OF BRUNEL: THE MAN WHO BUILT THE MODERN WORLD
Presented by Ian Swankie (UK)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

British people and visitors to the UK still find themselves amongst the infrastructure created by Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the 19th century. He changed the face of the British landscape with his ground-breaking projects including railways, bridges, tunnels, ships, and grand buildings such as the magnificent Paddington Station. He merged art with engineering and science and was a pioneer and a revolutionary. And he was brilliant. We’ll look at the man, his background, his work, and his legacy.

A Londoner with a contagious enthusiasm for art and architecture, Ian is an official guide at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Guildhall Art Gallery and St Paul’s Cathedral. He is also a freelance London tour guide. Since 2012 he has led a popular weekly independent art lecture group in his home town of Richmond in West London. Ian is an Accredited Lecturer for The Arts Society and a Freeman of the Worshipful Company of Art Scholars, one of the City of London’s famous livery companies.

Thursday 16 April 2026
PICTURE THIS! AUSTRALIAN NEW WAVE FILMS OF THE 1970s
Presented by Zana Dare (Australia)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

Film production took off in Australia in the 1970s, a period that came to be known as the Australian New Wave. Meet Australia’s greatest living playwright and discover some of the stars in award-winning movies made during this exciting period of cinematic renaissance. 

With an Honours degree in majoring in Australian history and a Graduate Diploma in Museum Studies from the University of Sydney, Zana worked in Australian museums in a variety of roles. Since retiring, Zana continues to share her passion for art, history and culture as an Enrichment Speaker, sailing with Regent Seven Seas, Viking, Cunard and Royal Caribbean Cruises. In 2016 Zana co-authored a book, ‘The Creative Pulse – 5 Steps to Stretch Your Imagination’

Thursday 14 May 2026
BERTHE MORISOT: IMPRESSIONIST INNOVATOR
Presented by Joanne Rhymer (UK)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

With her innovative use of colour, fluid brushwork, and attention to fleeting moments of daily life, Berthe Morisot stands as a defining figure of French Impressionism. Her experimental approach challenged academic conventions, creating a visual language of light, immediacy, and atmosphere. Beyond their surface beauty, her paintings convey deeper meanings. By examining a selection of works, we will see how, in negotiating her bourgeois upbringing and position as a woman artist, she reveals women’s inner emotional and psychological worlds. Our exploration will reveal how her luminous works capture the subtle complexities of life and female experience in 19th-century Paris.

Joanne Rhymer’s expertise in the history of Modern Art and the Politics of Representation has led to roles at the National Gallery, Tate Gallery, Wallace collection and other prestigious institutions in London and Cambridge. Specialising in 19th-century and early 20th-century French art, her interests include the visual skills involved in sustained looking at paintings.

Thursday 18 June 2026
AN INTIMATE HISTORY OF THE ART GALLERY OF NSW
Presented by Steven Miller (Australia)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

Since its founding as an Academy of Art in 1871, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has evolved into a leading international art museum. Steven Miller’s publication The Exhibitionists is the first comprehensive history ever published of this much-loved institution. In his lecture on the subject he will delve into the intrigues and the passionate debates, the great talents and the big personalities that have made the Gallery what it is today.

Steven Miller was the head of the National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 2009 to 2023. He has worked in commercial and public galleries since the late 1980s and published widely on art. The book he co-authored on the first blockbuster exhibition of modern European masters to visit Australia was awarded the NSW Premier’s History Award. His 2015 publication Awakening: Four lives in art is an exploration of the creation of national identity through art. The popular and informative Dogs in Australian Art is now into its third, expanded edition. He wrote the first history of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which was published to celebrate its 150th anniversary. He has a Masters degree in theology, as well as qualifications in art history and archives. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of NSW.

Thursday 16 July 2026
IS THIS THE REAL LIFE? HOW WRITERS AND ARTISTS HAVE CHALLENGED OUR PERCEPTIONS OF REALITY
Presented by Mary Sharp (UK)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

When Lucy goes through the wardrobe into Narnia, when Harry Potter opens his letter and when Neo takes the red pill, they all discover that the worlds they thought they knew are only part of the truth. From Plato onwards, writers and artists have been inspired to push beyond the everyday and to create other worlds that inspire our imaginations. This lecture explores what these stories tell us about how we view our lives and what it is that we most desire.

Mary is an experienced broadcaster and teacher with particular expertise in literature and drama. She worked for many years for BBC Radio 4 producing some of its most popular programmes, including Start the Week and Woman’s Hour, before joining the senior management team as a Commissioning Editor. Mary has subsequently worked as a teacher and Director of Sixth Form at a leading girls’ grammar school. She now runs her own company ‘Opening Up Literature’ which offers literature courses for adults including studies of Shakespeare and Creative Writing. Her most popular course is ‘Telling Tales’, which explores how writers and artists have reinvented classical stories. She is a professional bridge teacher and lecturer.

Thursday 20 August 2026
MASONRY, MANUSCRIPTS AND MUSIC: An Inspirational Journey Through Medieval England
Presented by Mark Cottle (UK)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

The architecture, manuscript illumination and music of medieval England are among the greatest achievements of any period of English cultural history. The aim of this lecture is to open a window onto this remarkable world to capture something of the essence of its Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, its equally rich span of manuscript illumination, both sacred and profane, and its religious and secular music. Essentially inspirational and aspirational, these are forms of artistic endeavour which can touch the sublime.

Born on the Isles of Scilly and educated at Truro School, Cornwall, and Birmingham University, Mark Cottle has enjoyed a career in education and training at home and abroad. He has lectured at Exeter College on Medieval and Tudor history, St Mark’s & St John’s University College, Plymouth, and at Bath University on Anglo Saxon and medieval England. Currently Mark runs two small companies providing training and study breaks.

Thursday 17 September 2026
ART OF THE JAPANESE GARDEN: FROM TRADITION TO MODERNITY
Presented by Marie Conte-Helm (UK)
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for under-standing the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japa-nese love of nature and the changing seasons has manifested itself in paintings and in the intimate and grand-scale gardens surrounding aristocratic palaces and Buddhist temples, as well as Zen-inspired dry landscape gardens with strikingly symbolic content. The lecture also draws upon wider examples to illustrate the distinctive qualities that the Japanese have brought to garden design, an approach successfully adapted to modern domestic settings and to Japanese gardens abroad.

Professor Conte-Helm is a long-established Lecturer of The Arts Society with a BA in History of Art and an MA in Asian Art. She has most recently served as Executive Director of the UK-Japan 21st Century Group, as Visiting Professor at Northumbria University, and as a Member of the Board of Governors of the University for the Creative Arts. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She was Director General of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation from 1999-2011 and has held senior academic positions at various UK universities.

Thursday 22 October 2026
LEE MILLER’S WAR: THE PHOTOJOURNALISM OF A COMBAT WAR PHOTOGRAPHER
THROUGH LEE MILLER’S OWN WORDS
Presented by Antony Penrose
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

Lee Miller is thought to have been the only woman combat photographer with the allied infantry in Europe during the second World War. This lecture presents her war photojournalism from shortly after D Day in Normandy, through the Siege of St Malo, the liberation of Paris, fighting across Germany, the liberation of Buchenwald and Dachau to the flames leaping from Hitler’s Berghof near Berchtesgaden that signalled the end of the war, and then the post war traumas of Austria and Hungary. The story is told through extensive use of Lee Miller’s own words, set to her photographs.

For the past 45 years, Antony has conserved and disseminated the work of his parents, Lee Miller and Roland Penrose. With his daughter Ami, he is the co-director of The Lee Miller Archives and The Penrose Collection at Farley Farm House in Sussex and has seen his parents’ work featured in major exhibitions at the V&A, National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial war Museum London, Manchester Art Gallery, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the Whitworth. He has lectured at museums and universities around the world and made documentaries for television. Publications include The Lives of Lee Miller, Lee Miller’s War (editor), The Angel and the Fiend, The Home of the Surrealists, Roland Penrose the Friendly Surrealist and The Boy Who Bit Picasso. The movie titled ‘LEE’ starring Kate Winslet is based on his book The Lives of Lee Miller and for ten years he was heavily involved with its production and release.

Thursday 19 November 2026
ON THE WILD SIDE: FILMING CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
Presented by Piet de Vries
Venue & time: Michael Hoskins Theatre TAS, 6pm

Learn about techniques for capturing extraordinary images for Sir David Attenborough and National Geographic. From playful macaque monkeys in China to majestic cassowaries in Northern Australia, illustrated with segments and images from nature documentaries.

Pieter de Vries ACS is a renowned documentary cinematographer whose incredible journey has taken him from the heights of the Space Shuttle to the depths of the North Atlantic. He has captured extraordinary moments around the world. Regarded as one of the leading documentary cinematographers, Pieter’s films have garnered numerous accolades, including Emmys and BAFTAs.