Norma Copeland – a Life in Art

1 March 2017

A life in art from beginning to end

Norma Copeland lives at Vasey RSL Care’s Hawthorn Independent Living Units in Manningtree Road. She and resident, Patricia Coe, recently exhibited their art at the Hawthorn Town Hall Gallery. Norma prefers mixed media whilst Patricia goes for water colours, often with Indian ink, charcoal or gouache. Both are self-taught and have come to it only recently. 

Bob Evans met with Norma to find out more.

“I’m content. And contentment is what we strive for all our lives.”

This is how Norma Copeland sums up her life, after sharing confidences and anecdotes with me for almost two hours in her spacious Hawthorn unit.

Achieving contentment through her own efforts and the assistance she’s been given by Vasey RSL Care, Norma thinks is a good outcome for a “theatrical old tart”, which is how she describes herself. Her connection to the theatre began with her father, a ballet master with a dance studio in the Manchester Unity Building on the corner of Collins and Swanston Streets.

Norma didn’t ever receive formal ballet lessons from her father, but he would arrange theatrical afternoons at home on weekends with friends and colleagues, where Norma would join other children dancing on a soapstone table top. Norma believes her sense of rhythm and movement is in her blood – she was always easily able to follow steps and join in.

Norma’s father set sail for a job at the London Palladium when she was about 12 years old. It was war time and there was no hope of the family joining him: it was years before he returned. Norma only hints at the hardships that her mother, brothers and sister endured, saying that the camaraderie and support of other “theatricals”, helped them along.

“Everything was shared when people were doing it tough.”

Norma has been a resident of Vasey RSL Care’s Independent Living Units (ILUs) since 1994, moving through a number of residences as Vasey Housing (prior to the merger with RSL Care) consolidated its locations in  Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. She moved into her current unit in the ‘Old Homestead’ in Manningtree Road about 18 months ago.

“I am so lucky to be here. I can see the garden from every window, which is why I’m more than happy to take care of it,” Norma says.

The walls of Norma’s unit are covered with her paintings. Another of her works-in-progress is propped on a small easel in the tiny space which she has adapted as her studio. With a wave of a hand, Norma says she is a tidy painter because she has to be, working in what would perhaps originally have been a box room, a space not much bigger than a cupboard. (She recently bought a rug to cover the carpet in case of paint spills!)

Norma may now be of a certain age (in fact she’ll be 88 next month) but she has lost none of the theatrical flourishes that first brought her to the attention of musical revue producers in the 1940’s. There is a certain serendipity to the way that the arts have book-ended her life.

“I was accidentally cast in a musical called ‘Starry Nights’ – it was all about painters and featured Vincent van Gogh, who is one of my favourites.”

Norma tells me she was sitting in the offices of the Tivoli Theatre waiting for a friend who worked as secretary to Tivoli Managing Director, David Martin. While she was waiting, Maggie Fitzgibbon (sister of banjo playing jazzman, Smacka Fitzgibbon) approached her and asked her what she was doing. When she said she was waiting for her friend, Maggie told her to take herself down to the wardrobe department, put on a bathing suit and join the audition for the upcoming show.

Whether she had misgivings or not, Norma did as Maggie said, shimmied into a costume, bumped about the backstage scenery and found herself descending a staircase watched by the musical director, Harold Mascetti, and the producer, Ginger James.

“They asked me if I could turn to the left and I said: ‘Yes’. And I turned to the left, and then they asked me to turn to right, and I turned to the right. And when they said I was to be ready to attend rehearsals at 10 o’clock the next morning, I fainted!”

With her intuitive flair for the theatrical Norma quickly found her feet on stage and began a career that took her on tours of Australia and New Zealand, appearing in musicals produced by Edgley and Dawe. During a nine-month tour of Tasmania, alternating between theatres in Hobart and Launceston, Norma met her husband, Lindsay, a percussionist with the show band. She and Lindsay went on to have two sons and were together for 40 years.

“I wasn’t only in the ballet. When Mrs Edgley found out that I could sew, I was fiddling around in the wardrobe, doing everything in there, too. And babysitting young Michael Edgley, because he was only a baby then: they got a very good deal with me! But they were such happy times.”

When the time came to leave the stage, Norma stepped into the glamour of department store fashion, making her debut as a Myer store model where she joined two other models in a live diorama window display showing window-shoppers how to play Canasta!

At Myer, she was given the chance to undertake an interior decorating course, which led to a career in fashion and interior design. Norma followed various managements from Myer to David Jones to Figgins and finally to Georges. Looking back on her design and fashion career Norma is particularly proud of the interiors she created for the Fawkner Towers apartments on St Kilda Road. She and Lindsay moved into one of these apartments.

“I worked with some of the very best sales people in the business who all loved what they did,” she recalls.

On retirement, Norma and Lindsay left St Kilda Road and built a house in Sorrento. But ultimately they didn’t stay together, separating after more than 40 years of marriage. Norma says it was her decision to leave and she left Lindsay because she had “more life to live”. While Norma stresses that the separation was amicable, she says she chose to leave everything behind.

“He was a good provider. We had raised two beautiful sons. I was the one who was leaving. He didn’t leave me. Leaving him and not taking anything may have been foolish in a way, but to me it wasn’t,” Norma says.

“I now realise how lucky I was to get a unit at Vasey Housing at that time. They really do wonderful things for you. I have nothing but admiration for them.”

But from the outline of Norma’s life, it is also apparent that she is a woman who does things for herself and for others. She has recently accepted the invitation to be an advocate for the Hawthorn Art Centre’s Town Hall Gallery. It’s a bold step on her part and an accolade for someone who has only been painting for 18 months, although she is modest about it.

“The Assistant Curator at the Gallery, Dr Kent Wilson, asked me if I would talk to people and tell them what I was getting out of being involved with the gallery,” she says.

Norma’s brush with art was inspired by another Manningtree Road resident, Nan Jones. Norma was walking down the driveway when Nan overheard her say: “Oh, I’ve lost my bloody keys” as she rummaged in her bag. “I told Nan I need to put a geranium behind my ear and whistle Dixie,” Norma says, meaning that she’d calm down and have proper look for her keys – which she found.

“I went around to Nan’s unit a couple of days later to say thank you and I found her in the kitchen painting. And I said: ‘I’d love to be able to do that’. And she said: ‘Well do it! Go down to the store and buy some paint, get some brushes and see how you go’.”

With Nan’s encouragement and the tips she’s gleaned from books on painting techniques borrowed from the Hawthorn library, plus advice from artist friends, Lisa O’Keefe and Jenny Fletcher, Norma has applied her design sense and style to create some well-regarded paintings.

In September, Norma and Patricia exhibited their works at the Town Hall Gallery in an art show entitled Mind’s Eye. From Norma’s perspective, it is all about communication.

“An accolade or a compliment now and again really encourages you to do something,” she says.

Letting Go

Spring At Last

The Fields