Where Lies Beauty, Port Kembla (2026)

10/02/2022

4 more sleeps until opening … got your tickets yet? https://merrigong.com.au/shows/the-sirens-return/

27/11/2021

NEW DATES: The Sirens’ Return has been rescheduled to 14-19 February 2022 at Port Kembla pool. Inspired by oral histories gathered through this project, The Sirens’ Return is a moving and evocative new music theatre work that reflects the spirit of place from the perspective of the women who embody it. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to: https://merrigong.com.au/shows/the-sirens-return/ 🧜🏻‍♀️🎶 📸

12/07/2021

NEWS FLASH!

THE SIRENS’ RETURN, is a new site-specific outdoor music theatre work which will be presented at Port Kembla Pool 15-20 November this year. The work is inspired by oral histories collected from women as part of this online Where Lies Beauty project and will be a moving and evocative work that reflects the spirit of place from the perspective of the women who embody it.

BOOKINGS: If you would like to book your tickets now to secure your spot on the grassy embankment overlooking the pool to experience this unique work set against the backdrop of Port Kembla beach and the escarpment at dusk, you can do that here: https://merrigong.com.au/shows/the-sirens-return/

SUPPORT US: The Sirens’ Return is a co-production between The Society of Histrionic Happenings (TSHH) and Merrigong Theatre Company. To date, TSHH has received generous donations from Merrigong, Create NSW (the state funding body), Wollongong City Council, and Wollongong’s Culture Bank towards the realisation of the beautiful and bold vision for this exciting new project.

We are hoping to raise a further $20-25K for the project and have set up an online donation portal through the Australian Cultural Fund (ACF) for this purpose.

Any contribution to this project - however small - would be greatly appreciated.

You can view more information on the project by going to the project page on the ACF website, here: https://cpaus.force.com/artists/s/project/a2E6F000003ZBGnUAO/the-sirens-return-a-new-music-theatre-work

The ACF is federal government entity set up with both DGR and TCC status, to receive tax deductible donations towards projects on behalf of artists.

Feel free to DM the director, Anne-Louise Rentell here with any questions.

Watch this space over the coming days for more information on the creatives and cast of The Sirens’ Return!

26/10/2020

“The revitalization was state government funded and auspiced by the Port Kembla Chamber of Commerce and it was my job to work with the retailers and come up with strategies to bring more people back into Port. At that point we still had 2 or 3 banks – Westpac, Commonwealth and the ANZ – but the vacancies had started and so we were looking at improving the streetscape. So I’m the person everyone hated because we introduced these funny little things called trees – not these trees, we had plane trees – and I remember all hell broke loose about putting trees on the street because it was a loss of parking.

“Then that funding ran out but we got this other funding to look at artists working with industry. So, we had a number of fabricators and artists working together to establish prototypes of steel-based furniture. They made a number of chairs and things and it was only 12 months funding and by the time we’d actually started to get somewhere, of course the funds ran out and so that was the end of that project and then the Western Sydney thing started up for me and I ended up working in Western Sydney for the next 4 years.”

– Ann Martin, 3 July 2017

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📸: Wollongong City Council landscape architect Jim Mitchell and Port Kembla Chamber of Commerce representative Ann Martin inspect progress on bollards at the intersection of Allan and Wentworth Sts, Port Kembla, 20 February 1992 – image from the collections of the Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society

15/10/2020

“Lucy Merrett and Ann Martin were kind of creative directors of this whole project in 1991. They had gallery spaces in the street as well. They had all these amazing ideas. The Star was the main thing that actually happened, amazingly – you know how hard it is to organize a week of performance not with a lot of money – but it was good. And after that we organized two or three more, two-night/weekend sort of things and that was kind of it …

“I’ve lost count of how many times they’ve revitalized Port Kembla. The Star Café was one of the earlier attempts. When you’re here at night after a certain time it’s pretty quiet apart from the odd element. And this sort of thing would be going on back then and you’d look out the street and it would be dead quiet, there was nothing. It was sort of like, you could do anything you wanted, there was no restrictions, as long as we didn’t make too much noise. I think we had the police come out a few times, we weren’t too loud, we had no sound proofing or anything it was just a curtain over a glass bloody window, it was very ad hoc you know.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

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15/10/2020

Scott Gordon MC at The Star Cafe
Video footage shot by Tom Spence in 1991 – provided by John Bonner

14/10/2020

“We were the main kind of organisers but everyone else pitched in, led by Rob Laurie, Mel Wishart, Trevor Brown and all the old creative art people. Everyone sort of pitched in. There was a whole group of us. We all went through the School of Creative Arts in the mid to late 80s when there was a real push for inter-arts, you had to be inter-arts … I actually went there to do painting and theatre and ended up hanging out with all the musos. If the School of Creative Arts hadn’t been there it wouldn’t have happened.

“That time was my sort of heyday, it was a golden era for me in the 90s, there was a lot going on, it was very creative in this area, everyone was playing in bands, there was so much happening. Maybe it’s just because we were younger but you know what I mean? It was a golden time for pub bands and performers. I was in three goddam bands and it was before the pub scene died because of DJs and pokies, the whole live pub scene just died a sad death in the 2000s. But at that time, there was a lot going on and I don’t think it was just because we were all twenty, thirty years younger, maybe that was something to do with it… I wouldn’t have time now, we’ve all got jobs. I’m a care worker with disabilities and I remember in 1992 I had just started my job and this was all sort of happening, that’s putting it into some fuzzy sort of timeframe.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

📸Trevor Brown and Ali Jane Smith in the Star Cafe ’91 – photo supplied by

13/10/2020

“I found this old book – I used to do all the bookings in it and I’ve written down all the people I’d rung, all these old names cropping up, it’s so long ago, 27, 26 years ago. All these people are still around. Scott Gordon was at the top of his game and he was our go-to MC for the whole performance week doing standup, he was bloody hilarious. There used to be this great trio, Trevor, Rob Laurie and Drew Fairley known as The Singing Men and they performed one night there. We got a bit of heckling at times, we had some pretty wild nights there. The room was quite a narrow space, a bit of a tunnel. We wanted to do a kind of Gothic thing and we asked Prik Harness (Michael Simic and Geoff Hinchcliffe) to do some fire eating and I remember that Geoff did this thing where he blew flames and it went right down the room and there was this tunnel of flames. How no-one got their heads burnt, I don’t know! It was totally off the wall, things like that would happen, no OH&S, I don’t think the place even had a fire extinguisher, you know what I mean? We were just winging it totally and luckily nothing went haywire.”

John Bonner, 17 August 2017
Image: The Singing Men – Trevor Brown, Drew Fairley and Rob Laurie – The Star Cafe 1991. A still from footage by Tom Spence, provided by John Bonner.

🎞: Scott Gordon MC at The Star Cafe - clip from video shot by Tom Spence

Drew Fairley John Bonner

12/10/2020

“We had a band called the Rather Raw Nots. Originally it was Luke Bourke, myself and Mandy Evans, we were the band. We had to literally set the whole thing up, build the stage and get people to come. The stage was milk crates and bits of plywood and whatever lights we could make up – I had bloody fruit cans with light bulbs in them with gels on them. We had a cover charge at the door, it was $3 donation (how are you going to pay 10 performers with that?). Lubja filled up his milk bar thing with those little twist tops, you know not the normal ones, but the tiny little mini ones, and sold them for about $5 each – he was reaping it in! He was pretty supportive – he offered the space and let us do what we wanted and sold his “twisties” at exuberant prices and kept running down to the pub to get another box of them. It was pretty funny.

“I just remember it was kind of like a wild west town, we’d still be going at two in the morning…they were totally loose nights, there was no “12 oclock, everyone out”, as long as people were having fun we kept going. It was totally open-ended in that respect and we did get a few locals coming in and I remember getting heckled one night and getting told to play AC/DC and getting quite perturbed. You had all that going on because they were like “you’re in our space” so there was a bit of that. But you had this nice juxtaposition, you had all the Macedonian guys, they weren’t budging, they were still going to play their poker, and all these artsyfartsy lot would come I and go into the other room, they had to come in through it all. And there was bit of cross-fusion in the end.

“We were all unemployed artists you know living the dream and somehow we pulled it off, we managed to organize a week of performance café.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

11/10/2020

“It was very grass roots. I don’t actually remember if we got any money at all to be honest, maybe there was some funding, I can’t remember. When I was going down memory lane, I dug out an old poster and I’ve got this one. There was an amazing artist here, a lady called Lucy Merrett who was a very good friend of Ann Martin’s and she did a lot of screen printing – we had a lot of screen printing artists who used to work out here and had studio spaces out here in Port Kembla. This is one of the posters Lucy did – that’s Roselyn and the Lions, do you remember that movie? It was a foreign movie which was trendy at the time.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

📸 of John Bonner by
📸 still of The Star Cafe in 1991 from video footage taken by Tom Pence, provided by John Bonner

11/10/2020

“I came to this area in the late 80s to go to school to study arts and it was really Ann who got it all going. It was a council scheme to revitalize port Kembla and she had a grant in 1991 and she approached us, because we had a band, and asked “do you want to run a performance café for a week?”. And that’s how it all started. It was called The Star Cafe. It’s all closed up now but it used to be a Macedonian milk bar. It was run by a guy called Lubja and you’d go in there and it was like something out of the 50s, old guys playing chess, drinking whiskey, that sort of thing. It was a place where Macedonian men hung out. You’d get these shish kebabs, and it had sort of two rooms – it had a milk bar room and then it had another room on the other side so it was like a u-shape.”

– John Bonner, 17 August 2017

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John Bonner

Where Lies Beauty

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