Season’s greetings from Smythesdale

A PROJECT by the Smythesdale Progress Association to bring some festive joy to the town’s historical precinct has been unveiled.

Murals depicting the 12 Days of Aussie Christmas and created by a local artist with help from school kids and families have a new home around the common next to the historic courthouse.

The public artworks are in lieu of the Smythesdale community carols event that’s on hiatus due to COVID.

“Every year we have a display of Christmas cut-outs, like our Six White Boomers, but this year we wanted to try and jazz it up a bit,” said Bill MacNeill, secretary and treasurer of the Progress Association.

“Lin [Hocking-Turnbull] came to us with the idea of getting murals done of the Twelve Days of Aussie Christmas, so we really wanted to do that and decided we’d fund it ourselves rather than look for a grant.

“Because we weren’t able to do the carols, we wanted to try and do something extra.”

With the plan set of what the Association wanted, and money to pay for it, the group started looking for partners.

Linton based creator Tania Woolley came on board as the primary artist and designed the 12 murals.

The raw artworks were then split up among families in the district, and classes at the Smythesdale campus of Woady Yaloak Primary School.

“We wanted to do it as a community art program but normally that would involve people getting together in the one space, and of course we couldn’t do that,” Mr MacNeill said.

“So we got Tania to do the basic outlines on the boards and then we gave six to the school and then six to families from the community who painted them as well.

“Bunnings were fantastic, they donated most of the materials for the project, so it worked out very well for us.

“The school was also fantastic and really got on board. They have been missing a lot of their community involvement.”

While the Smythesdale community carols event might be off for this year due to COVID-19, organisers have said all going well it will return in 2021.

However, before then the Progress Association has something else in the works.

“We’re hoping, presuming normal COVID life continues, we’ll probably do something around Easter next year,” said Ms Hocking-Turnbull.

“We’ve found the feedback is people are not so much interested in things, they want community activities.”