Driftwood and recycled timber craft

Having spent most of his working life deferring his dreams, John Butt is now restless with creative energy. “I can hardly wait to get up in the morning,” says the self-taught craftsman. As a young boy he remembers always wanting to work with his hands but became a manager instead. That changed when he and his wife Lyn built the district’s first mudbrick house to an Alistair Knox design at Elliminyt, just south of Colac. Creating that house stirred the dormant creative spirit in him. “It got me going, working with tradesmen, watching and picking up skills. That, and working with my son James, an artist, who first interested me in using driftwood.”

For ten years the family poured their hearts and souls into the home. It would have taken a mighty wrench for them to leave, but that wrench was Apollo Bay, a spectacular force in itself. John had always wanted to live by the coast. The family bought a block overlooking the ocean as an investment, but the tug of the tides was too powerful to resist. The inspirational natural beauty of Apollo Bay and the quality of the community here made a difficult decision not quite so hard for them.

John now lives two dreams: he lives by the sea and works with his hands. Always sensitive to the beauty and needs of the environment, John and family are natural recyclers, way beyond putting kitchen scraps in the compost. Their house testifies to the ingenious ways old things are put to new use. Part of the fun of John’s work is sourcing materials for the workshop. At first sight of a neglected piece of wood John can see the finished article, complete in form and function. Like himself, his pieces develop a second life. Talk to John and you know you’re talking to a contented man. “The creative spirit and hard work keeps me young – ish,” he grins. His sparkling eyes strip away the years.

Photographs

As a teenager, Lyn’s father presented her with a Box Brownie camera. This was the beginning of her love for photography. Over the years Lyn has continually taken photographs, but it was since moving to Apollo Bay in 1989, where the natural beauty continually inspired her, that she began to take this art form seriously, so much so that in part it has become a passion In 2000 she gathered up all the photos she had taken and realized she had a ready-made photographic business. “Water and weather,” says Lyn, “can provide an exhibition’s worth of shots in mere minutes, if you’re fast enough to keep up with the changes in movement and light.”

Concurrently in 2000, an additional room built for no special reason on Lyn and John’s beautifully sited property on the Great Ocean Road, Apollo Bay, almost begged to become her studio. All the photographs that were the result of hundreds of hours spent capturing the inspirational environment of Apollo Bay now had a home, Lyn’s Gallery. Two of her prints live away from home however, on the walls of the Parliament House, Melbourne. Seeing her work displayed at the Botanic Café in the gardens by Lake Colac, the Colac Otway Shire commissioned two of Lyn’s prints as gifts to the Upper House when it sat in Colac in November 2005.

Lyn is often told that she has an eye for a photograph, which is an art that can’t be taught. She likes to use her camera as an artist’s brush, composing and creating abstract and landscape works. As Ansel Adams made Yosemite his patch, Lyn has made Apollo Bay her sole subject. “I surely have Viking blood running through my veins,” she explains, because of her abiding and enduring fascination with the ocean. As a subject for her studies “the forest is yet to come,” she says, but given the way her eyes continually incline to the water outside her window, that might be some time coming.

Australian photographs and stationery

Leslie married into a third-generation fishing family, which is not what you’d expect of a person who loves the desert, but does explain why you won’t find her at the market during winter: she’ll be deep into the outback with her husband Tony and the 4WD. Her interest in photography started early when her father took shots to record the family’s bush holidays. She’s always loved the isolation of the bush, with its big skies and wide, open spaces. With the kids grown up and gone, she can get back to her love of travel, which brought her to Apollo Bay in the first place.

The Geelong girl travelled the bush by herself, working two and a half years at the Carnarvon National Park in central Queensland, before coming back this way. In 1984 she came down to Bimbi Park to ride horses but “got married and got stuck,” she laughs.

Never a fan of portraits, Leslie took snaps of the tall ship The One and All when it anchored in the Bay, just outside the harbour in 1989. When people started buying her prints, she knew she had a business. It wasn’t until her kids left home in 2002 that she found the time and space to devote to her images. Leslie had her own dark room but now she does everything electronically, because “you can do more with it.” She uses it to help design her stationery, like the travel journal she has made, which is purely a product that comes from her direct experience. In an easy-to-complete format, it records all the things you want to keep track of as you go. The travel journal is just one of a range of calendars, place mats, coasters, bookmarks, cards and framed photos that Leslie makes at home.

She’s a busy woman, Leslie, but she says if you live in a tourist town you work hard during the season and travel hard after it. Her hard travelling takes her to all points of the country. If you’re headed bush yourself, talk to Leslie. She’s probably been to where you’re going.