Corina Turner Gallery: In the Flinders Ranges area of the Outback region of South Australia

Quorn in the southern Flinders Ranges is a famous railway town. It played a key role in life of the old Ghan rail line, which snaked it's way into the centre of Australia.

And with the railway came jobs for people from all around the world. One of them was Hans Elsner. He left the rubble of war-torn Berlin and emigrated to this sleepy little town and became a porter at the Quorn Railway Station. Soon after, his daughter, Carina Turner followed as an eight-year-old. She did not speak any English and had vivid memories of home.

“There were women with their hair tied up in turbans and overalls and they were up to their arm pits in rubble, you know cleaning up bricks for a living. Cleaning up Germany.”

Young Carina threw herself into art and over time she developed a passion for batik, the finer points of which she explained for our camera:

“It's actually where the wax doesn't go is where the colour is happening,” she told us. “I think in Africa they used flour paste instead of wax. It's a very ancient medium.”

First developed in Indonesia, batik creates a striking effect. But it requires layers and layers of artistic effort.

“You go colour by colour, darker and darker…”

But there's nothing dark about the subject matter. Perhaps it's a reaction to her past, but much of what you see in her Quorn Gallery is all about elegance and style.

“I copied a lot of Gaugin pictures just to get an idea and I translated them into batik in the early days and then I had to find my own style. Since then, I have melded the two.”

Encouraged by her former husband, Owen Turner, soon Corina’s works were featuring classic country Australian scenes like the old bank building next door to her studio and gallery.

“I thought (the building) was the quintessential Quorn image... The old bull-nosed verandah, the wrought iron work and the pepper tree.”

Carina’s gallery is also full of her latest medium - glass. The doors and windows feature stunning leadlight - a move she reckons was obvious.

“If you look closely at my batiks they are made to look like leadlights because I always wanted to do glass.”

Again, features from the surrounding countryside make their way into her glass panels. She showed us a painting of Devil’s Peak, which dominates the surrounding farm country. It’s an image every Quorn local knows well and it's one of many that stayed with Carina when she left the district for forty years. She eventually returned thanks to one of the many movies shot around her adopted home.

“I got homesick when I saw the Shiralee, the Brian Brown film. I started weeping helplessly at Bribey Island and I came back here thirty years later and found the place was just like it was in the film. It hadn't changed so I thought somehow, I have to come back and I did.”

Now she's back for good working at the Carina Turner Gallery in First Street, Quorn. It's open daily.

Carina Turner Gallery
First Street
Quorn
Open Daily