Bowral & District

Tuesday 10 Feburary 2026
CUTTING RHYTHMS, SHAPING STORIES: How Film Editing Works
Presented by Karen Pearlman
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

Few aspects of creative filmmaking are as shrouded in mystery as the work of the film editor. What do they do? How does it work? Film editors will usually say their art is intuitive – magic, instinctive, inexpressible. But this lecture explodes the myth that good editing is invisible, and reveals what goes on in the edit suite to save movies, tell stories and make thousands of bits of footage into coherent and compelling films. Drawing on her first-hand experience as an editor and her many years as a professional dancer, Karen Pearlman puts forward the idea that editing is a form of choreography. She shows how editors shape movement – movement of story, movement of emotion, and movement of image and sound, into moving experiences for an audience. Clips from Pearlman’s Australian Screen Editors Guild Award winning films, and quotes from her internationally distributed book on film editing, ‘Cutting Rhythms’, are woven into this talk.

Karen, senior lecturer in Screen Production at Macquarie University, is the co-director of the multi-award winning Physical TV Company, through which she has been responsible for development, production of numerous highly acclaimed and award winning dance-films, documentaries and dramas. Karen is the author of Cutting Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing published in many countries by Focal Press, and now in its 2nd edition. She held the post of Head of Screen Studies at AFTRS for 6 years and was a long serving member of the editorial board of Lumina, the Australian Journal of Screen Arts and Business.

Tuesday 24 March 2026
UNDERGROUND CATHEDRALS: The World-Class Art, Architecture and Design of the London Underground
Presented by Ian Swankie
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

The world’s first underground railway has a unique heritage of architecture, ingenious design, powerful advertising posters and unique calligraphy. This talk plots the early development of the Underground, examines the legacy of Frank Pick and Charles Holden, looks at some of the iconic posters, and celebrates the award-winning architecture of the modern Tube in the Jubilee Line extension and the brilliant Elizabeth Line stations, designed by some of the world’s top architects. 

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.

Tuesday 23 June 2026
ARTS 1900 – 1920: Tornado of Change
Presented by John Swainston
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

As 1900 dawned, England was celebrating Edward Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variation’ and Jospeh Conrad released ‘Lord Jim’. 1902 saw the opening of New York’s ‘Flatiron building’. Colour photographs appear in France in 1908, just prior to Picasso’s ‘Girls with a Mandolin in 1910. By 1920 Alban Berg was finalising his opera ‘Wozzec’. The Bauhaus School has opened in Weimar, Jazz was booming in New Orleans and W.B. Yeats had released ‘The Second Coming’. A veritable tornado of change.

John Swainston has been a photographer, writer and broadcaster for fifty years. Educated at Winchester College and later studying at Magdalen College, Oxford, he has lived in Australia since 1979. He has lectured on both the history of photography and its art and technical practice for over three decades. As a photographer his work has been exhibited in Sydney, Melbourne and the Southern Highlands (NSW). Since 2016, John has been documenting and researching the history of the Anglican Cathedrals of England and Wales. His work traces the influences on and development of church architecture over fifteen centuries, including churches in Normandy in France.

Tuesday 28 July 2026
GENTILITY, GOSSIP AND GALLANTRY: Common misconceptions about Jane Austen
Presented by Mary Sharp
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

Jane Austen’s novels are often characterised as lightweight romances dealing in trivialities and portraying a limited social sphere, reflecting the constricted circumstances of the author’s own life. This lecture offers an alternative reading, suggesting Austen is not interested in romance but moral challenge, not a mild spinster but a social commentator of contemporary relevance. Mary will read and discuss extracts from Emma and Pride and Prejudice, posing and considering questions such as how we should view the tedious Miss Bates to whom Emma is so famously insolent and how we should judge the over-excitable Mrs Bennet.

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.

Tuesday 1 September 2026
CHURCHILL: An Inspirational Life in Photographs, Words and Paintings
Presented by Mark Cottle
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

From the 1890s to the 1960s, Winston Churchill’s life was captured in countless photographs. A prolific writer and speechmaker, the definitive edition of his speeches alone runs to four volumes. A successful and enthusiastic artist, he produced some 500 paintings in over five decades. Churchill was a complex and sensitive man of many parts and interests – a discriminating contemporary, Kenneth Clark, wrote of him, “I have never been frightened by anyone except Churchill … he was a man of a wonderful and very powerful mind”. This lecture portrays the richness, diversity and achievements of Churchill’s life and character.

Born on the Isles of Scilly and educated at Truro School, Cornwall, and Birmingham University, Mark 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.

Tuesday 29 September 2026
THE ART OF THE JAPANESE GARDEN
Presented by Marie Conte-Helm
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

This lecture introduces some of Japan’s most famous gardens and provides a context for understanding the principles of Japanese garden design as it has evolved through the ages. The Japanese 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.

Tuesday 3 November 2026
LEE MILLER AND ROLAND PENROSE AT FARLEY FARM
Presented by Antony Penrose
Venue & Time: 5pm, Annesley Ballroom, Annesley Bowral Lifestyle Centre, 10 Westward Drive, Bowral

The story of Roland Penrose, British Surrealist artist and biographer of Picasso, and Lee Miller, the American Surrealist photographer, who shot fashion and combat with equal talent, as seen through the eyes of their son Antony Penrose, who is also their biographer. We look at how their early lives formed their motivations and how they strove to use art to make the world a better place. The last decades of their life together were at Farley Farm, their home in Sussex which was frequented by many prominent Surrealist and Modern artists.

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.