Greetings from Wollongong might sound like an invitation, but it’s also a challenge to locals and visitors alike to look at a difficult, not-too-distant history.  

It’s the antithesis of a vacation postcard.   

 Kaylene Milner, along with Louise Brand, Aneshka Mora and Daniel Mudie Cunningham, carefully curate the vision of the artist Mary Callaghan, who passed away back in 2016.   

Amongst tapestries and installations filled with political slogans and demonstrations is a film being projected on the wall at the back of the exhibition space.   

Francis Wiedersatz worked on the pre-production for the film produced by Callaghan’s company, Steel City Pictures.  Wiedersatz had been flagged to play the lead, but broke her ankle before production and had to be replaced.  

But when the artist Mary Callaghan first approached her about being part of the film, she just thought it would be a simple project.   

“I think that my initial impression was that it was just gonna be something really straightforward using a Super eight camera or something like that. But all of a sudden, we were in this world of fundraising and going to the Australian Film Commission to get funding, and it was bigger than what I expected it to be,” Wiedersatz explains.   

The film was initially screened in the Illawarra at the Vista in Woonona, which closed its doors in 1987. The film had been featured in the 29^th  Sydney Film Festival in 1982.  

The Film 

“It’s basically about the day in the lives of a few unemployed people in the Wollongong area. It’s, you know, like just what people do; shoplifting and, you know, having coffee because that’s about all you can afford.” 

Wiedersatz says that she hadn’t realised the depth the film would go when it comes to the social challenges Wollongong was facing or the breadth of her involvement in making the film happen.

The multimedia exhibition opened at the Wollongong Art Gallery on 14 June and due to end on 31 August, on working class resistance and the history of activism in Wollongong and the rest of the Illawarra at the Wollongong Art Gallery at 46 Burelli Steet, Wollongong.