From the desk of ROLAND ROCCHICCIOLI

THE excellent notion to convert Ballarat’s erstwhile Neil Street Uniting Church into a permanent creative and performance space — Ballarat Performing Arts Community (BPAC), should be supported at every level of government and community. With implacable daring, it will become the enduring legacy of all those who recognise the merit of the intention.

In the distant time, beyond the year 2125, when students, academics, anthropologists, and social scientists, are looking to make sense of the 20th -and the 21st -centuries, they will turn first to the performing and visual arts, to architecture, books and writing, television programmes, films, music, and even food, to try and make sense of who and what we were as a people — how we expressed ourselves, and how we related — one to the other. The winner of the 2025 AFL grand final will be an historical footnote demonstrating a spirit of community enjoyed, for the greater-part, by those who could afford to pay for the pleasure.

On recommendation, the international theatrical producer John Frost auditioned a young man from the Ballarat cast of the musical, Hairspray. Ultimately, they offered him a part in The Book of Mormon. That is how the theatre used to work. Now it is not so easy to get a break. The creative live-theatre career I have enjoyed in Australia, England, the United States, and other countries, is — for the most part — a relic. The radical changes in permanent theatre company structure would make it impossible for those starting-out on a career to have the opportunities I was gifted when I was 19.

Small productions in small spaces are less frequent — which is why the BPAC project is imperative. It is one of the finest spaces I have seen — ever — in the world. The London Jermyn Street Theatre studio is a try-out space for even big-stars, and which seats 70. English chums would be green with envy at the Neil Street centre. The church is acoustically perfect — as all churches are it seems; it has no sight-line problems — and certainly, you will not fall asleep because the pews are too hard!

As churches empty of congregations, only to be sold and converted, BPAC is a community endeavour which Bendigo could emulate, with alacrity, following the enviable triumph of the city’s Art Gallery. Neil Street church is a perfect performance space. It could — with support to raise $2-million for May 2026 — become a unique and fertile space fostering new Australian works — a space to mine and discard the dross — and to find the one, rare, flawless diamond! It is how works are created.

Michael Whitehead and the originators of this plan should be applauded and championed. If the theatre is to survive, and budding writers, and composers, are to be given the opportunity to breathe life into their work — and to set it free to soar into the theatrical cannon — it will happen in spaces like Neil Street.

There is a richness-in-life to be found in works of great writing. They leave a lasting shadow on the heart and feed the soul — it is the manna from heaven which sates the spiritual appetite — and will be found — in abundance — in the fruitful Neil Street complex.

Roland can be heard with Brett Macdonald radio 3BA — Monday 10.40am. Contact: [email protected]