A lovely gathering, hosted by David Houston, President of the Dunera Museum Committee, welcomed my exhibition to the Hay Shire Library on Friday 31 August. Robyn Howard, Hay Shire Librarian, facilitated the exhibition and has been a great support, even enlisting her husband, Robert, to help me to hang it.
A couple of dozen guests from the Museum, Council and the Dunera Association attended the opening to view the etchings and to celebrate the publication of the latest book on the Dunera Boys on the eve of the 78th anniversary of their arrival in Hay. The book is terrific:
Dunera Lives: A Visual History by Ken Inglis, Seumas Spark and Jay Winter with Carol Bunyan (Monash University Publishing, 2018).
The next morning we attended a very moving re-enactment of the arrival of the Dunera Boys at Hay Railway Station. Locals played the parts to the strains of ‘Va, pensiero’ (known in English as the “Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves”) from Verdi’s Nabucco.
Alex Byrne Printmaker 