Clifton icon turns 111

“I stand on the shoulders of giants,” Clifton School of Arts president David Roach told a full house of special guests and local residents who turned out on July 16 to celebrate the historic building’s 111th birthday.

Striking miners built the community-owned School of Arts in 1910 and volunteers have run it ever since.

Among more than 60 people who attended the event were Wollongong Lord Mayor Councillor Gordon Bradbery, Alison Byrnes (Member for Cunningham), Lee Evans (Member for Heathcote), and Ben Franklin, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, the Arts and Regional Youth.

Other guests included CSA past president Vicki Potter, CSA past treasurer Alison Wiig, author and broadcaster Caroline Baum, and local historian Dawn Crowther.

The CSA committee has recently received permission to build an extension at the back of the school, designed pro bono by Sydney architect Tim Antiohos. To make the design a reality, the Clifton School of Arts is reaching out to the local community, with a fundraising goal of nearly
a million dollars.

The miners who built the School of Arts in 1910 completed construction in just six months.

“They could have built another church or a Sunday school,” David said, “but what they decided to build was something lasting, something that was going to be here for a hundred years, which was going to enrich their culture and give their lives, and their children’s lives, something other than the lives they’d had.”

“They could go to a dance, they could have lectures, a library, a billiards room.”

The building fell into disrepair in the mid-1980s.

Via cake stalls and lamington drives, volunteers managed to raise an enormous amount of money to get the building back in shape.This is one of many examples that show the care and effort that locals have put into the Clifton School of Arts over more than a century.

“Those miners would have a great sense of fulfilment if they were alive today,” David said.

Visit www.artsclifton.org and, for more history, read Chronicles from Clifton: Clifton School of Arts 1911-2021 Celebrating 110 Years by Dawn Crowther.