Guest speakers

We have a regular treat of great guest speakers. Recent speakers have been Ron Ramsay of the Newcastle Regional Gallery, and Gionni DiGravio, archivist at Newcastle University. Our Gallery has been undergoing many upheavals about where it will be housed, the building and storage of the collection, and the inevitable squabbles and moves to achieve this. There is only a small part of the collection on view at any one time, as is common for all galleries, but the problem for Newcastle is that some of the collection will NEVER be displayed as there is no suitable place in the existing building. The National Gallery is deeply envious of some of the paintings held here and Newcastle has been endowed by generous local citizens - William Bowman, Margaret Olley, Anne Von Bertouch and many others. Some members had to admit they had never stepped foot inside the gallery, a situation soon to be remedied by a "vocational visit" behind the scenes.

Gionni surprised us by telling us the Newcastle University holds the only copy of the building plans for the Town Hall. He is currently spasmodically working through our own Honorary Member Jim Downie's papers. Jim and his family have such a long connection with Newcastle and Mayfield that his papers are an invaluable resource. Gionni reminded us that we should NEVER "clean up" after a family member dies but let an archivist look over his/her papers and possessions first. He also reminded us that material objects are only a fraction of our personal histories and only come alive with the real story of a person when they are connected and narrated. Oral histories are best done by asking a question of the person and then videoing them answering. The movie function on a simple digital camera is perfectly adequate as it captures gesture, movement, facial expression as well as the words.