The Magnetic Island Museum is busily sending out its 2025 calenders, entitled Looking Inside , containing interior views of old houses , hotels , the wreck of the City of Adelaide, some advertising and the Argonauts eatery at Horseshoe Bay - a floating nosh venture brought up from Victoria which caught fire .
Meanwhile , a Museum volunteer is well advanced transcribing , typing up and placing in chronological order the many letters of the former island resident and pioneer oyster farmer , reef protector, the late Keith Bryson , described as the hermit of White Lady Bay .
During a discussion with the Museum president , Zanita Davies, she told this blog of the island's long history of people involved in arts and literature . She recalled that the artist Margaret Olley had visited the island with another renowned artist , Donald Friend.
Olley had stated that the vibrant colours of the island , especially the bougainvilleas , had made a big impression on her . As a young girl ,Olley had lived on a cane farm at Tully and was a boarder at Townsville's St Anne's Church of England convent, where she was influenced by an artistic nun.
Recently Magnetic Island artist Steve Crowe who , with his artist wife, Sharon, run Pandanas Art Space , at Horseshoe Bay , a studio gallery offering vibrant North Queensland views, won another Townsville art prize ; earlier in the year he won a Cloncurry award with a striking landscape .
Their daughter, Nicole, a writer and communications expert , has just signed a contract with a British publisher for a crime novel set in the tropics. NEWS TIP FOR MEDIA : Talented family feature article here and other interesting follow up yarns involving James Cook University, Papua New Guinea , etc., etc., etc.
(Island, Art, Novel.)
