Northern Rivers

Distinguished and Famous people from Northern Rivers

🖼️ Margaret Olley

Margaret Olley was born in Lismore in 1923 while her family lived at Horseshoe Creek near Kyogle. Childhood connections across the Northern Rivers preceded art study and a career particularly associated with still lifes and domestic interiors. Her later generosity as a patron and donor helped other artists and public collections. The Margaret Olley Art Centre at Tweed Regional Gallery gives her work and recreated home-studio a substantial regional presence. The apparent informality of crowded rooms, flowers and household objects was part of a disciplined artistic practice: ordinary things received the kind of sustained attention most of us reserve for finding the car keys.

🎸 Troy Cassar-Daley

Troy Cassar-Daley grew up with his mother at Grafton, with school-holiday visits to his father in Sydney. He has described music as a way of negotiating those two parts of his childhood and feeling that he belonged. Visits to the Tamworth festival encouraged him to perform, and by sixteen he was touring northern New South Wales with Little Eagle. Solo recordings and major country-music awards followed. The family experiences behind the songs give the local connection depth: Grafton was home in an upbringing whose joys and difficulties later supplied material for writing and performance.