Keeping the Narrabundah College days alive

A bunch of former students from the legendary Narrabundah College are getting together this week, presumably to talk about the good old days, back when they were students in the mid-1980s.

Except that for a whole generation of Canberra creatives, those really were the golden years for arts.

The group is staging an exhibition, Alight After Dark, to celebrate the fact many of them have day jobs, but keep their creative flames alight after hours.

Others have established creative practices, or jobs in the sector that allow them to keep in touch with the sector.

Organiser Mags Stewart, herself a Narrabundah graduate who now works as an actors' agent in Sydney, said the idea for the show came about during lockdown last year.

An old school friend had reignited her own art practice and sent her some images of tiny wire animal sculptures.

"They were really optimistic and playful and I had an initial discussion with her about potentially doing a little pop-up exhibition of this work," she said.

"And then it started to dawn on me that I actually had a circle of people around me from the Narrabundah days who all had really interesting, creative practices."

She started to cast about for other fellow graduates who might want to get a show together, and ended up with 14 contributors.

She said for her and her school friends, who all attended Narrabundah in 1986, 87 and 88, the experience had been one of creativity and inspiration.

"For me, it felt like utopia," she said.

"I came from a Catholic girls' school, and then went there, with the sense of creative freedom and personal freedom and the seriousness with which the arts were considered, and people were very much encouraged to engage deeply with it across music, filmmaking and visual arts, drama. So it felt like it was an incredible incubator."

Narrabundah still has a reputation for its focus on the arts, but she said 1980s Canberra was also a perfect setting for a budding creative.

"Growing up in Canberra, I think, was a massive positive for me, because we had the space and almost the isolation in which to experiment," she said.

"There was definitely a thriving set of subcultures in Canberra at the time. So there were a lot of little punk kids and, you know, skater punks and alternative hippie types running around.

"What was interesting is kids grew up a lot faster then, so a lot of my friends had left home at 16 and 17 and were living in these crazy group houses. It definitely felt incredibly lively, and intellectually stimulating."

She said working with young creative types today, she was struck by how "corporate and safe" things seemed.

"That was one of the things I really wanted to illuminate [in this show], just that sense of raw, open creativity," she said.

The exhibition, which opens on Friday, has a range of artworks, some for sale, by 14 very different artists, around half of whom still live here.

"There are a few who are professional exhibiting artists like Heidi Jackson ... and there are people who have worked creatively for a long time. Alex Whitlam is one and he's been a designer and animator for many years.

"And then there are definitely people who have just been committed to a creative practice for the last 30 years, despite the fact their day jobs may not necessarily reflect it. And that's one of the big things I really want to celebrate with this, is the commitment to those values that people have held fast to over all this time."

She said the age they were all at, having finished school in the mid-to-late-80s, also informed the spirit of the show.

"I think I think it's a really interesting age, because obviously, we're no longer young but we're not yet old, and to be standing at this particular pivot point," she said.

"And looking back over the creative lives that we have already led, but also where we're standing now and what may come next and what may evolve."