Piano taken down gold mine for unique underground concert in Bendigo

By Anna McGuiness

A unique piano concert 61 metres underground in an old gold mine.

That was the brainwave of Bendigo Fine Music chair Thomas Heywood.

And yesterday that brainwave became reality, with a piano descending into the Central Deborah Gold Mine in Bendigo for a one-off evening performance.

The 300kg piano was formerly owned by Mr Heywood's mother, who was a renowned concert pianist.

"It's one of those classic 'don't drop the piano' scenarios," Mr Heywood said.

"We couldn't find any evidence that this has been done before.

"It's really quite emotional; it sounds fantastic in here. It is an amazing room for sound. There's a timber ceiling and hardstone walls, and they're ideal for musical performance."

Thomas Heywood came up with the idea of holding the concert in a gold mine to mark 175 years since gold
was discovered in Bendigo. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

The Bendigo Fine Music event celebrated 175 years since gold was first discovered in the central Victorian city.

"In 1851, it changed our wonderful country forever,"  Mr Heywood said.

"We were always taught in school that basically the riches that followed from gold made possible what would have taken 500 years in European history to be achieved in a mere 50 years to Federation."

Friday's concert was limited to 60 attendees, who were allowed to remove their hard hats once in the concert room.

Pianist Yasmin Rowe said performing this rare and unusual concert was exciting.

"I've never played underground before, and this is just so special. When I entered this room, I thought it was so, so beautiful," Ms Rowe said.

"You've got this millions-of-years-old rock there right behind the piano; the light, the colour, the atmosphere is wonderful."

Yasmin Rowe and Ian Munro played before an audience of 60 people. (ABC News: Tyrone Dalton)

Ms Rowe and fellow pianist Ian Munro said the underground concert made playing the piano interesting again.

"It's quite a dry acoustic. We have to adjust in real time, so using less pedal cause it's quite reverberant."

Mr Munro said the rare and unusual concert brought back the memory of a conversation with his piano teacher at the age of 14, who questioned whether he would continue to love playing the piano as an adult.

"When I was 30 [and still loved playing piano], and now I'm very much older than 30, I'm still very interested; it's still got that magic for me."

The operation to get the instrument underground was a family affair by Joshua McPherson, his wife Jo and son Sam.

Mr McPherson said it was "definitely the most unusual" place he had ever taken a piano.

The disassembled instrument was wheeled on a trolley into a lift and rolled along the rocky tunnels of the mine.

"We were worried about moisture dropping from the ceiling — that was our main concern. [It was] a little bit rough underfoot but nothing scary really," he said.

Nic Hamilton was tasked with making sure the piano stayed in tune.  (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

Once in place, it was over to piano technician Nic Hamilton to ensure nothing had gone awry on the journey and to tune the piano before the concert.

"It's on the humid side but it takes some hours, perhaps even overnight to seep into the piano and cause any problems,"  he said.

"It's a fun thing to do, and it's very typical of Thomas [Heywood] to come up with projects that are interesting and exciting."

The piano is moved into the entrance to Central Deborah Gold Mine. (ABC News: Anna McGuinness)

First published at ABC News, October 10, 2026

'An object of lust': How the ancient Greek goddess Aphrodite became a controversial symbol of love and sex

By Matthew Wilson

Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos was lost but later Roman copies like the Capitoline Venus are similar
(Credit: The Ashmolean Museum)

Artworks depicting Aphrodite, the ancient Greek goddess of love and beauty, have long been branded obscene, objectifying the female body. How did she become one of the most controversial figures in the history of art?

The nudity of Aphrodite (or Venus as she was known by the ancient Romans), has been a topic of debate for centuries.

In 1880, the shocked author Mark Twain called Titan’s Venus of Urbino (1534) ”the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses". In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson hacked Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) with a meat cleaver at least three times in the middle of London's National Gallery. "I didn't like the way men visitors gaped at it all day long," was one of her later explanations.

Aphrodite: the Makingof a Godess, a new exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, explores the history of the goddess. It helps to explain how she evolved into a lightning rod of such intense cultural controversy.

There are two versions of her origin story: a mythological one and a historically accurate one, and neither particularly marks her out as a future troublemaker. In myth, the tale begins with Kronos castrating his father Ouranos and flinging his genitals into the sea; foam began to bubble to the surface, and out of it arose a fully formed Aphrodite. She glided across the waves to the island of Cyprus, where her footsteps caused flowers to bloom miraculously from the land.

“One of [Aphrodite's] names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It's not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life – Anja Ulbrich

The historical version of Aphrodite's birth also begins on Cyprus, where she emerged as a deity around 1200BC. She was a distinctive new addition to the pantheon but had features that had apparently evolved from older Middle Eastern goddesses like Ishtar, Astarte and Hathor. For these archaic goddesses, "sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics," Anja Ulbrich, curator of the Ashmolean exhibition, tells the BBC, "but they all had more than one function".

And the same applied to Aphrodite, who in her early years wasn't just a goddess of romantic love, but of all physical love and procreation – in the animal and plant world as much as the human realm. And there are other, perhaps less well-known, sides to her persona. She fought in the Trojan War – and this warrior aspect of her personality led her to be worshipped by the ancient Greek navy.

In 1914, the suffragette Mary Richardson hacked Diego Velázquez's Rokeby Venus (c 1647-51) with a meat cleaver in London's National Gallery (Credit: The National Gallery, London)

The historical version of Aphrodite's birth also begins on Cyprus, where she emerged as a deity around 1200BC. She was a distinctive new addition to the pantheon but had features that had apparently evolved from older Middle Eastern goddesses like Ishtar, Astarte and Hathor. For these archaic goddesses, "sexuality, love and fertility were their core characteristics," Anja Ulbrich, curator of the Ashmolean exhibition, tells the BBC, "but they all had more than one function".

And the same applied to Aphrodite, who in her early years wasn't just a goddess of romantic love, but of all physical love and procreation – in the animal and plant world as much as the human realm. And there are other, perhaps less well-known, sides to her persona. She fought in the Trojan War – and this warrior aspect of her personality led her to be worshipped by the ancient Greek navy.

Following her original appearance on Cyprus back in the 13th Century BC, Aphrodite became a big hit with people, and worship of her spread all around ancient Greece. Why was she so appealing? "Fertility, love, procreation is a topic across humanity, no matter which culture," Ulbrich says. "One of her names is Pandemos: the goddess of all people. It's not just the warriors, or the women: love affects everybody and everything. It pervades life."

A new kind of nudity

So far, so uncontroversial. For several hundred years, artists didn't make Aphrodite look particularly different from other female Olympian goddesses. And in her early years, they did not typically depict her naked, and certainly never in the more provocative poses we now associate with her. But then, in 350BC, an artwork appeared that changed everything.

Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos (c 350BC) was the first completely nude artwork of a woman in ancient Greece. The original sculpture is lost, but we can get a good picture of what it looked like by later Roman copies like the Capitoline Venus (c 160BC).

Before Praxiteles, it was only male figures who were shown undressed. "Celebrating physical male beauty through nudity was perfectly normal from the 7th or 6th Century BC onwards," Ulbrich says. So, Praxiteles chose to do the same for female physical beauty.

Aphrodite's nudity was different. If you look closely, you can see how dissimilar the presentation of nudity is in Greek male sculptures: it's all in the body language. Praxiteles's Aphrodite is shown caught whilst bathing. She appears shy and vulnerable, covering herself in shame or embarrassment, whereas the nude male body in Greek art had always been shown as confident and heroic. Ulbrich explains: "It is mostly based on how she's presented in myths, where she is constantly bathing and working on her physical beauty."

But in Praxiteles's artwork, Aphrodite's hands are positioned slightly away from her, making it possible for a viewer to see her exposed body if they look at it from different angles. It's an artwork that invites interaction, and rewards the spectator for their sensual curiosity. These innovative artistic techniques would cause heated debate in centuries to come, and a name was coined for the pose of the Praxiteles's sculpture: the Venus Pudica (modest or shameful).

The Aphrodite of Knidos was "revolutionary," says Ulbrich. Before Praxiteles, Aphrodite might be recognisable in sculptures from a range of different items of clothing, jewellery and other attributes. Afterwards, he says, "the nudity basically takes over."

It's worth acknowledging that a naked body is completely natural, and not controversial in its own right. What would make Aphrodite so provocative in later years was not her being undressed, but how her body was posed for the gratification of a viewer. It turned her into an object of lust.

Praxiteles's original sculpture was so inspirational that it was later copied thousands of times by Roman sculptors, of which the Capitoline Venus is just one famous example. A new way of looking at women's bodies in art had been unleashed by the Venus Pudica, and it spread to all the territories governed by the Roman Empire including Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

Aphrodite's erotic rebirth

But the influence was not restricted to the ancient world. During the Renaissance, artists began to seek out and copy classical sculptures with more determination than they had for a millennium. And one of the most admired was the Venus Pudica type. So, Aphrodite, in her nude, seductive and humble persona, as devised by Praxiteles, was reborn in artworks by Massaccio, Botticelli, Raphael and Titian – artists who would later become the "great names" of art history. Some artists used the pose to depict Aphrodite, but many adopted it for other types of female figure. It also inspired other artists to devise new poses based on the same essential premise of diffident nudity.

Aphrodite was reborn in artworks such as Botticelli's The Birth of Venus and Yves Klein's 20th Century version
(Credit: The Ashmolean Museum)

And so, via artists' repeated rehashing of the Venus Pudica, the objectified female form became an indelible feature of the art historical canon. Rubens and Velázquez reincarnated it in the Baroque period. It was revived by Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, and by Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. The outrage of Mark Twain and Mary Richardson are responses to this history of Aphrodite's eroticisation. 

And so, via artists' repeated rehashing of the Venus Pudica, the objectified female form became an indelible feature of the art historical canon. Rubens and Velázquez reincarnated it in the Baroque period. It was revived by Cabanel and Manet in the 1800s, and by Modigliani and Yves Klein in the 20th Century. The outrage of Mark Twain and Mary Richardson are responses to this history of Aphrodite's eroticisation. 

As the symbol of ultimate beauty and desirability, Aphrodite has been adapted and reconfigured to reflect the needs of her audience for 3,000 years and counting, a remarkable lifespan for an ancient Greek deity. Another astonishing idea is that a single sculpture – Praxiteles's Aphrodite of Knidos – has shaped our attitudes to nudity so profoundly.

There's no sign of her dominance over mortal affairs ending, or her controversy subsiding – the subject of beauty and how it is handled will be forever relevant, and always up for debate, reflecting public opinion as it unfolds over time. "Depending on the context, people have just narrowed her down to what they need and what they want," says Ulbrich. "She is very versatile, you know."

Aphrodite: The Making of a Goddess is at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum until April 2027

First published at BBC, October 8, 2026

Did a Scottish film 'beat Hollywood to the punch' as the first ever talkie?

Playwright Graham Moffat played the character John Snodgrass, with his wife Margaret playing Janet Struthers,
in the play Till the Bells Ring

By Pauline McLean

"Wait a minute. You ain't heard nothing yet."

That promise, spoken by Al Jolson in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, made movie history.

The first recorded dialogue on film, Jolson's eight well-chosen words marked the birth of the "talkies", delivered by one of the biggest stars on Earth.

The moment has long been celebrated in popular culture - most memorably in the 1952 film Singin' in the Rain - and there are plans for a variety of events to mark the centenary next year.

But what if those words weren't the first?

Researcher Marc David Jacobs has uncovered evidence that the first-ever talking feature film was Scottish.

And it was screened in Edinburgh - a whole year before Jolson's voice hit the cinemas.

The film was based on this stage production

Graham Moffat was a Glaswegian playwright who wrote plays for his touring company. In 1925 he decided to turn his debut play, Till the Bells Ring, into a film.

He approached a London-based company called De Forest Phonofilm, which had patented a system which allowed synchronised audio to be recorded directly onto film.

The early quality was poor, and it was mostly used to record short performances such as vaudeville or music hall acts.

But the Moffats had a much more ambitious plan in mind.

They wanted the entire company involved in a 45-minute feature film with synchronised sound and dialogue throughout.

The cast of six included his wife Margaret - a noted actress and one of the first suffragettes to be arrested in Scotland - and his daughter, Winnifred Moffat.

There was even a role for their dog.

A year later, they screened the film, first at a disastrous private demonstration which was marred by faulty equipment.

And then on 11 October in Poole's Synod Hall in Edinburgh, where it was billed as "a super talking picture of Victorian Scottish life".

Jacobs said: "Silent movie audiences would have been used to walking in and out, or leaving halfway through so people had to be warned not to come in in the middle of the film and disturb everyone.

"They had to be told not to talk themselves, just as if they were at an actual play.

"And people do, and it's amazing.

"You can see in the reviews, even the sort of people who are professionally being paid to watch these films, there's a sense of wonder."

An advertisement in the Edinburgh Evening News from October 1926 - calling the film a "super talking picture"

The film ran for a week, with the Scotsman reporting "the movement and sound are perfectly synchronised and after the listener becomes accustomed to the phenomenon of screen figures appearing to talk and the ear attunes itself to the sounds there is no difficulty in catching the spoken words."

The paper also commended Graham Moffat's "true Scottish humour" and was so impressed with the offering it sent a reporter back for a second screening.

The film was clearly well-marketed and caught the attention of the press.

So why has it fallen into obscurity in the history of sound on film?

According to Jacobs, the film was acquired by an unscrupulous exhibitor who re-released it in 1933 as a brand-new film.

Moffat sued and won his case in 1935, after which all copies of the feature were returned to him. But the film was apparently never shown again.

He died in Cape Town in December 1951, never having made another.

One of his plays - Bunty Pulls the Strings - became a huge hit on Broadway, but his landmark contribution to cinema has never been recognised or celebrated.

Marc David Jacobs said there was a "sense of wonder" in the reviews for the Scottish talkie

And the film itself? Jacobs believes the only surviving copy of Till the Bells Ring is in the BFI National Archive in Hertfordshire.

It has not been shown privately or publicly since being acquired by the BFI more than 50 years ago.

He hopes the print can be examined and restored and a search undertaken for any other surviving material.

And he feels that would see the Moffats and their film get the credit they are due.

"I was amazed to discover the unbelievable story of the Scottish family production that beat Hollywood to the punch," he said.

"But I was even more astonished by the complete lack of interest in it.

"It was as if it was impossible to believe that a major piece of world cinema could have come out of a tiny London studio, hired by a canny Glaswegian playwright.

"But it did. And nearly a century after it was last seen, the time has finally come for the world to recognise Graham and Maggie Moffat's world-beating achievement."

And the first words ever spoken in the world's first talking feature?

The heroine, Aggie, says: "Still anither mornin' and never a word or a sign o' him.

Eh, me! The sun's gettin' through, so we'll be wearin' oor braws to the kirk the day."

To be fair, Al probably had the better line.

First published at BBC, October 6 2026

New musical honors SF’s former nexus of Black culture

By James Ambroff-Tahan

Local playwright Danny Duncan has dramatized the Fillmore district’s rich cultural past, and what it has become today, in “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical).” Pictured above: The Fillmore Heritage Center at 1300 Fillmore St. in San Francisco on Monday, Oct. 5, 2026. Craig Lee/The Examiner

The vibrant Black neighborhood that once existed in San Francisco’s Fillmore district is personal for Bay Area playwright Danny Duncan, because he grew up there.

Inspired by that experience, Duncan wrote a musical that dramatizes the Fillmore district’s rich cultural past and what it has become today in “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical).” Staged by the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company, the opus will make its world premiere Oct. 10 through Nov. 1 at San Francisco’s Strand Theater.

“I was about 9 or 10 years old in our house on Pine Street and my father converted the basement into a rumpus room, aka nightclub, with a bar and benches,” Duncan said of the family’s house, which became a hub of Black late-night social life in the 1950s. “My mother was a waitress on Fillmore Street and, in her spare time, every Saturday night she had after-hours because, culturally, Black people did that in the big cities.”

The after-hours club at Duncan’s house included a kitchen that prepared food for the attendees. It was where he and his cousins worked as servers. Proceeds from the sale of beverages, including alcohol, and food defrayed the cost of running the enterprise.

“Mama had to pay the people who were waiting for her in the after-hours, and she would use that money for the house and paying her bills,” Duncan recalled. That’s why they used to call it a rent party. You were breaking the law by doing this, but it was something that was done all over America because nobody had the money to pay for a liquor license.”

Duncan, who is also a director, composer, choreographer and educator, remembers the elaborate, multi-day social rituals Black people would engage in every weekend in San Francisco.

“They would go to these after-hours clubs and stay until six in the morning, and then they would leave and go to Jack’s on Sutter Street to do jazz at sunrise,” Duncan said. “Then, they would go home, get dressed and take the children to church, and then come home, take a nap and make Sunday dinner. I don’t know how they did it, but they did.”

The adults who attended Duncan’s family after-hours club included people from all walks of life — waitresses, dentists, janitors, maids, butlers and longshoremen — who, he said, dressed to the nines for the occasion.

“Every Saturday night, they would transform themselves into duchesses and counts, the Black nobility,” Duncan said. “It was really something to see.”

Duncan, who said his musical is heavily inflected with jazz and bebop, recalled that even jazz luminaries of the era, like Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, Carmen McRae and Nat King Cole, showed up at the after-hours club. As welcome as these stars were there, the discriminatory practices of the era brought them to the neighborhood, as it limited their lodging options in The City.

“They couldn’t stay at the Fairmont, where they were appearing, so they had to stay at the Booker T. Washington Hotel at Ellis and Fillmore,” Duncan said of the landmark six-story establishment that opened in 1951 and was demolished in 1970. 

The hotel, along with other Black-owned businesses, centers of culture and a legendary jazz scene helped earn the Fillmore neighborhood the name “Harlem of the West.”

Bay Area playwright Michael Gene Sullivan, who co-wrote the musical’s story with Duncan, said he worked with him to tell the tale of this dynamic period for Black culture in San Francisco after World War II.

“All these Black families who moved here to be part of the war effort, to work in the factories and shipyards didn’t just disappear, as much as the city and government would have liked them to,” Sullivan said. “They stayed and created their own world inside San Francisco; their own culture, music, poetry and politics, and the activism that came out of that time in response to being shunned and pushed to the side.”

Local playwright Danny Duncan wrote a musical that dramatizes the 

Fillmore district’s rich cultural past and what it has become today in

 “Every Saturday Night (A Harlem of the West Musical)." Courtesy of SFBATCO

The story of the musical follows two Black boys, Young Donte (Jacob Henrei-Naffaa) in the 1950s, and Adaré (Trevor Miller) in the present day, who put human faces on the different eras of the Fillmore district.

“The teenager from the past is growing up really idolizing his mother, his primary parent; he loves her, respects her, but he also is trying to find a way to express himself in a way that won’t upset her,” Sullivan said. "She definitely has a plan for him, but like many teenagers, he’s trying to figure out who he is going to be, and how can he be that person without his mother feeling betrayed by him.”

Sullivan added that the modern teenager is also trying to find himself, but in a more outgoing way and with different energy.

“He’s almost fatally infected with trying to be cool; he’s got the hoodie, he’s playing games but he hasn’t found what way he’s going to express himself yet,” Sullivan said. “Anything he does, if it’s not ‘cool,’ then he shuts that down himself.”

Duncan recalled the very changed Fillmore landscape in which the modern teenager lives. The neighborhood — now heavily gentrified with few Black residents — in the early 1980s started facing the crack cocaine epidemic. Duncan’s mother, by then an old woman, decided to close the after-hours club.

“The crack epidemic came into the Black community and changed the dynamics of our culture,” Duncan said, noting that residents had to begin closing their front doors, for safety. “My mother was fortunate in that some of the old timers looked out for her, so if crack dealers came to the door, the old timers would turn them away.”

Duncan, who said the musical asks urgent questions about who gets to stay in San Francisco today, but provides no answers, has a bittersweet theme he would like audiences to consider.

“It’s like Camelot — there once was a place called Fillmore and it’s not here anymore,” Duncan said. “It’s very much like President Kennedy’s love of Camelot; it was something mystical and magical. We didn’t have to go downtown for anything in the Fillmore because we had it all — and now all of that is gone.”

First published at the San Fransisco Examiner, October 5, 2026