COVER STORY

Having lost a young son to cancer, Allanah Dopson has spent years channelling her grief into enhancing the local art scene. Now, she’s on the verge of launching our newest festival

Meet the powerhouse behind the inaugural Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival

On any given day at Salamanca, Allanah Dopson can be seen holding court at Handmark Gallery, where for the past decade she has been championing nearly 100 Tasmanian artists and artisans. With disarming, star-like poise, candour and warmth, she has drawn in the public and shared with them her love of art and her artists’ work and stories.

“She is one of the most talented and special people I have ever met,” says Dopson’s friend and mentor, Tasmanian-born chief executive and artistic director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Timothy Walker, who worked with Dopson at the Australian Chamber Orchestra in Sydney. “[When we met] she impressed me with her style and vivacity. She presented extremely well [and was] beautifully dressed in Chanel-style suits. She was sparkling, interesting and full of ideas.”

Now, after a decade in the visual arts, the gallery director is revealing herself in full by returning to her roots in classical music as a singer, pianist and concert manager, with the launch this month of the three-day Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival at Evandale in the state’s north.

It’s a bittersweet moment for Dopson, who says she may not have realised her vision for the festival if her youngest son Christian hadn’t died of brain cancer, at 13, four years ago.

“I feel his death has made me realise that life is short,” she says. “I never know whether it’s my last day, either. That’s always lurking in the back of your mind after seeing your child die: that life is so fragile. Doing this music festival is something I’ve always wanted to do. So at least I will be doing something that goes back to my music, which was my first love in a sense.

“I loved what Leo Schofield achieved with Hobart Baroque and seeing people really enjoy something together. This festival will showcase our heritage, our food and wine, our brilliant musicians and music, which to me is pleasure.”

Tasmania’s newest festival

is an expression of Dopson and the people and experiences who have shaped her. While an essential distraction from grief, it has also returned her to a place of solace and memories of happy times as a child, student and arts professional. It’s given her an opportunity to do what she loves most and does best: create events that connect people in stimulating ways, in a joyful place.

Dopson’s hero, while studying towards postgraduate qualifications in arts management in London, was English mezzosoprano Dame Janet Baker, who was known for her no-nonsense directness, sincerity, determination and charm, as well as her respect for old-fashioned values such as discipline, hard work and professionalism – all qualities Dopson shares.

When we meet at Dopson’s stately, historic South Hobart home, she is a little flustered but also warm and welcoming. It’s a busy day and she is needed back at the gallery where there are staffing issues.

We walk through a central hallway with high ceilings and artcovered walls to the kitchen to make tea but, apologetic, Dopson discovers most of her small, red tea canisters are empty. One of the last tins yields enough leaf for a pot, and she makes herself a green tea with lemon. ABC Classic FM plays in the background. The grandeur of the elegant Georgian room, with 16-foot-high french doors, plush drapery, shelves of art books and a grand piano, belies the fact this is the home of working parents and their 20-year-old son Will.

Dopson’s life in Tasmania has been largely defined by two things: Christian’s illness and eventual death, and her work at Handmark Gallery. The Brisbane-born gallerist moved here when her Tasmanian husband Nicholas Heyward accepted his current role as managing director of the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra in 2001. The couple had been living in Adelaide after periods in Brisbane and Sydney.

Dopson had a busy, fulfilling life as an arts administrator in Melbourne (with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra), Sydney (with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and Intercontinental Hotel) and Brisbane and Adelaide (in arts publicity); as well as countless nights out at MSO and ACO concerts, in addition to the ballet, opera and theatre. She was a carefree, contented mother of two. But all that changed in 2005, in Hobart, when Christian was diagnosed with brain cancer.

The sense of her loss

and lasting grief is omnipresent in this contained, quiet room. Dopson tells Christian’s story as though compelled, and with painstaking and harrowing detail, in tears – from the first sign something was wrong with Christian, when he started vomiting during a soccer match and their belief he was sick with a virus, through to his diagnosis, treatment, periods of remission and final days of at-home palliative care.

“The night of the tests, about 9pm, we were admitted to the paediatric ward at the Royal, and we still knew nothing,” Dopson says. “Nicholas and I were called into a room and they said: ‘Your son has multiple tumours in the brain and we have to operate if not tonight then first thing in the morning. I have the full team here, this is your surgeon, this is your anaesthetist, this is your so and so.’”

It was two years before Dopson went back to work. She bought Handmark Gallery in 2007 partly so she could be available as needed for Christian, who had suffered a palsy – from which he eventually recovered – hearing loss and learning and speech difficulties as a result of multiple brain surgeries. “It was incredibly confronting as a mother,” she says. “He was stick-thin, and after several bouts of chemo he had to learn to walk again. We had speech therapists working with him, and Nicholas and I learnt how to sign.”

Dopson says Nicholas “coped by working” and Will likewise did what he could to get by. “It was very, very difficult,” she says. “Will was just a quiet, determined achiever in the background. He was there for Christian and he just had to soldier through, which he did. But he knows there’s so much love for him. We’re very close. You just love your children so much.”

Christian died at home in 2013 with Dopson and a palliative care team administering to him daily. “I remember saying to him, ‘It’s OK, you can go, it’s OK’,” Dopson says. “I guess it’s then you absolutely realise what life is all about. You have seen your child through a journey and he’s been so incredibly strong. And you’ve been right there for him.”

Determined, focused, unyielding. Dopson is this and more. She says work was, and remains, a vital distraction from grief and a source of solace. “It really was me putting on my high heels every day and my red lipstick and going to the hospital and we just got through it,” she says.

Devastated by her son’s death, Dopson was unsure whether she could continue working in the arts. “In some sense, art seems frivolous when people are sick and dying,” she says. “I really asked myself, ‘Do I want to go back into the arts?’ It’s such a different world being in that hospital system and seeing people on a daily basis who are suffering.

“[But] I think you realise that it’s OK to have joy, and that we all do need inspiration and we do need to live and get beyond that somehow. But it certainly wasn’t easy. It was, ‘How can I be talking about the arts when people are dying’.”

Despite her sadness – or perhaps because of it – Dopson has worked tirelessly over the years, adding artists to the gallery’s stable, broadening Handmark’s original focus on craft and design to include more painters and printmakers, giving her artists more showing opportunities each year, and opening other arts businesses, including a second Handmark gallery, at Evandale, and a visual arts consultancy.

“The loss of a child at a young age is devastating for a mother, and for Allanah managing the deterioration of Christian and his death was the hardest challenge of her life,” says Walker of his friend’s loss. “I know there will never be a moment for her when the grief is no longer there and that channelling her life into ambitious and time-consuming projects is the antidote to her depression. I am full of admiration for her.”

Dopson’s childhood years

were a blur of piano and ballet lessons, music and concerts. “I did ballet right up until I was at an advanced level, and that was a three-day-a-week commitment through high school,” she says. “As well as doing piano and everything else … those five days were full and the weekend was ballet as well. Now I wish I’d played tennis. That would have been much more social. It was never social, it was a very singular thing.”

Her capacity for discipline and hard work was evident during her years in Brisbane, where she lived until she was 21. She says her father, an accountant, and mother, were caring people who instilled a love of music and the performing arts in her. They exposed her to exceptional artistry at a young age. “I went to see [British dancer] Margot Fonteyn and [Soviet dancer] Rudolf Nureyev in Brisbane. I remember because my mother also sewed and she would make me a new dress to wear to the opening of the opera or ballet and I was only eight,” Dopson says. “It was the true only-child experience. I can remember going for a milkshake and buying the Maltesers. It was always the three of us. It was a family thing. We subscribed to all these things.”

On Sunday mornings, Dopson’s father would play records, mostly operas, and she and her mother would try to guess the name of the piece and the artist. It was a safe and loving environment, but Dopson says it was difficult being an only child.

“It was very contained. I think it’s both wonderful and difficult being an only child because you are the centre of the universe and they smother you with love,” she says.

At 21, Dopson left home with the support of a Queen Elizabeth II Silver Jubilee Scholarship to do a one-year postgraduate degree in arts administration, at London City University.

As an undergraduate in Brisbane, at the Conservatorium of Music, she had been encouraged to focus on singing, but she could also see a future in arts management.

“I enrolled in a Bachelor of Music thinking I would become a high-school music teacher and then I was told, ‘Actually, why not change and be a singer, a performer?’,” she says. “So I thought, ‘Oh, well, I’ll give that a go’. So I swapped things around and made voice my principal subject with aspirations, of course, to be the next Joan Sutherland, which I very quickly realised wasn’t going to happen.”

In London, Dopson again worked hard – at her studies, in her work placements at prestigious arts organisations and during weekly singing lessons with English National Opera baritone Denis Dowling. She immersed herself in the culture of the city – though without “the reckless abandon” of other Australians who have lived in London. “I wish there was that abandonment in me, but sadly there’s not. There’s something in me that’s always reserved,” she says.

“[But] London was the most extraordinary time of my life. I was studying but I also had friends working at Covent Gardens. Every night I went out and bought the cheap seats for the opera, ballet and theatre.

“On the side, I was studying singing as well. I used to travel out to Highgate every week to have my lessons. There was always this passion … I had quite a lot of singing friends over there and they were at the opera school and it was just so cut-throat and so hard, and they were so good. After a while I just thought, ‘I’m not going to make it’.”

Dopson had steady employment from her first part-time jobs in London, with the prestigious English Chamber Orchestra, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (establishing its box office and Friends society) and the Australian Film Commission.

“I was young and they were lowly jobs but, yes, they were a little bit glamorous and a bit scary,” she says. “I think I’m only just now starting to feel a little more confident. I had a sense of my capabilities but that was because I worked hard at whatever I did. I would never really put my hand up. I might have been able to do it but I’m not one to really promote myself. I just do it.”

That can-do attitude served Dopson well on returning to Australia in 1988, for a role as concert manager at the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Crucially, it was during her time in Sydney in the ’90s, as development manager and deputy general manager at the ACO, and later as PR director at the Intercontinental Hotel, that the wheels were set in motion for her eventual move to Tasmania and sideways shift into the visual arts. While there, Dopson hosted Archibald lunches and other events at the Art Gallery of NSW, for the Intercontinental. She met Nicholas on a group bushwalk – a “blind date” arranged by Walker, who at the time was general manager of the ACO.

“Things didn’t move very quickly,” Dopson says. “Again, I was totally reserved. My mother had told me you never contact a man so I never did. Even at 30. I had this work ethic, so I used to hope he’d contact me. Tim finally had us over for dinner, and that sort of moved things along a bit.”

The couple married in 1995, eventually moving to Brisbane (“my parents were deliriously happy”) and then to Adelaide for Nicholas’ work. By then, Dopson had an arts publicity consultancy business, which combined with other part-time roles, gave her the flexibility she needed as a mother with two young children in tow.

When the time came to move to Tasmania in 2001, Dopson welcomed it. “Nicholas had always wanted to return to Tasmania [where he grew up],” she says. “The job as head of the TSO came up and that’s probably the only job he would have come back to Tasmania for. You take all the moves in your stride. I was a mother with two children. I would find something to do.”

Dopson took a role managing Arts Tasmania’s new industry development arm, arts@work (“it was too exciting a job not to take on part time”) and launched the inaugural Living Artists Week, which opened her eyes to the “quality and volume of the visual arts in Tasmania” and introduced her to Pat Cleveland, who owned Handmark Gallery, and other gallerists.

“That was our first Living Artist Week and I think there were 795 visual artists who wanted to be involved and do things,” she says. “I was just overwhelmed by the total interest and amazingness of the visual arts in Tasmania. It was state-wide. There were open studios. I was shocked by the quality and volume of the visual arts here.”

When Dopson bought Handmark in 2007, she wanted to expand its portfolio of artists and engage with the public about Tasmania’s visual arts, both in the gallery and at associated events. “If I analyse what gives me the most pleasure, it’s making or promoting something and bringing people together,” she says. “That’s what I like, which is why running a gallery is just wonderful. You’re talking to people about art and they’re discovering things, which is what I’ve done throughout my life.

“At Handmark we are very welcoming and open. We don’t want anyone to feel, ‘Oh they’re a gallery, we can’t go in there’. People have seen it a bit more like a shop, so they’re perhaps not so intimidated by it. I’ve made changes and we are continually upgrading. I’ll keep doing that because you have to keep striving.”

Dopson says she’s always tried to showcase the diversity of the arts in Tasmania. “I’m very proud of our printmaking stable of artists. I wanted to showcase printmaking in Tasmania and actually opened the gallery 10 years ago with a printmaking show with artists such as Barbie Kjar. I actually went to Dick Bett [who represented some of the printmakers] and said, ‘Can I do this, can I showcase printmaking in Tasmania?’, and he said yes. We had a split commission.”

Dopson has expanded her stable of artists to include more painters and printmakers while remaining faithful to Handmark’s artisan roots. She represents 95 jewellers, ceramists, furnituremakers and designers as well as painters and printmakers.

“Allanah has put her own stamp on the gallery,” says nationally acclaimed printmaker Jennifer Marshall, who is represented by Handmark. “I knew the former owner of Handmark, Pat Cleveland, and it can be difficult to put your mark on something that’s been around for a long time. Allanah is inclusive. I have come across a lot of so-called gallerists and most of them are about themselves – their ego drives their work. I have never got that sense with Allanah. She is a strong, honest woman.”

Dopson’s latest project,

the inaugural Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival, is in many ways a reflection of her life’s work.

Inspired by Leo Schofield’s Hobart Baroque, Dopson’s smaller chamber music event, which she hopes to hold annually with help from patrons and other sponsorships, features some of her favourite artists in historic places.

“I originally wanted to do Hobart Baroque again and I initially went down that track [with Christopher Lawrence, of ABC Classic FM] but quickly realised it would require too much Government support, which we were unlikely to get. I then went off on my own,” she says.

Walker is not surprised by his friend’s latest venture. “The breadth of skills required for such an undertaking is all within her grasp because of her illustrious career,” he says. “She knows what has to be done and she knows how to do it and it will all be done with great style and professionalism. She is one of these people who could do anything. Indeed, when Nicholas was appointed to the TSO I was on the board and I remember thinking we could just as easily appoint Allanah to this position.”

The festival program began to take shape about 18 months ago, when London-based Australian pianist Piers Lane agreed to perform at it. “I really started with my friend, pianist Piers Lane, who has given so much to music and is just an amazing person,” Dopson says. “I really wanted him in my first festival. So I said, ‘Are you available?’ He agreed, and that was the starting point of the program. Chopin piano music is an absolute favourite of mine.”

The program also features the acclaimed Tasmanian early instrument ensemble Van Diemen’s Band, directed by baroque violinist Julia Fredersdorff. The group will perform a program of Italian concertos, including Vivaldi’s recorder concerto in C major and the famous Corelli Christmas concerto with recorder soloist Genevieve Lacey.

“This will be Van Diemen’s Band’s fourth concert ever,” Dopson says. “They got a great reception in Hobart at their concerts for 10 Days on the Island. This is taking them to the next stage and they’ll be launching their first CD at their performance.”

The Tinalley String Quartet will perform quartets by Mendelssohn, Barber and Dvorak at the opening-night concert at Clarendon Barn, before supper at Clarendon House. Marshall McGuire will perform a solo concert of harp music at Harland Rise Barn, and at the Anglican Church with Lacey.

Dopson says the event is different to other chamber music festivals, which are usually held at one venue. The Tasmanian Chamber Music festival is spread across six, including Clarendon House and Barn, Evandale’s two historic churches, the Falls Pavilion, a private barn, and Josef Chromy vineyard’s barrel hall and restaurant.

Festival passes ($500 for six concerts, including lunch at Chromy’s and a supper) sold out within two days.

“I didn’t know it would be such a success,” she says. “There’s a real hunger for this sort of boutique event. I love what Tasmania has to offer and I love bringing people together to celebrate.

“Music and art is incredibly nourishing.”

The Tasmanian Chamber Music Festival runs from Friday, October 27, to Sunday, October 29, and both festival passes and single tickets are sold out. To register for advance notice of next year’s event, which will be held at the same time (from Friday, October 26, to Sunday, October 28), visit taschamberfestival.com.au