PEOPLE OF THE COAST • Nola Charles
NOLA CHARLES
Hitting the right note WORDS CLAIRE BRAUND
THE CENTRAL COAST HAS MANY HIDDEN TALENTS. FOR CELEBRATED INTERIOR DESIGNER, NOLA CHARLES, BEAUTIFUL DESIGN COEXISTS WITH THE PERFORMING AND VISUAL ARTS AND, ABOVE ALL, MUSIC.
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ola has called the Coast home for 20 years. She has often looked back on her rather eccentric childhood wondering just how she managed to become such a passionate music lover, when she still doesn’t know where Middle C is on the piano! Her father, a celebrated Australian conductor and Director of the NSW (now Sydney) Conservatorium of Music from 1966 to 1971, was pretty determined that Nola’s childhood would not be a repeat of his. The fact that his musical mother named him ‘Joseph Mozart Post’ and his brothers ‘John Verdi’ and ‘Noel Schumann’ gives you a hint. There are many of his students from the Conservatorium who still remember him affectionately as ‘Jo Mo Po’. He won a scholarship to the Conservatorium aged nine and, at 15, played oboe with the NSW State Orchestra but had mixed emotions about Nola following in his footsteps. She remembers when she was about five years old, her father grudgingly delivering her to the local piano teacher for instruction. ‘I was given a sheet of music to take home and practise before the next lesson. When I handed it back next week, I had joined all the notes together and made them into little people running up and down the hills. The teacher told Dad that she may be able to teach me to play a piano, but I would never be a musician!’ She recalls that her father only intervened once more in her musical education. ‘My 13th birthday was looming, and he asked me if there was something I would like and he seemed unperturbed when
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I announced that I would like a record of the jazz pianist Errol Garner. So, I put it on order at the little local record store and when it arrived, I rushed home and put it on the turntable of the Phillips Radiogram. Wonderful!’ ‘A few minutes later all hell broke loose! Dad stormed into the room screeching about the abominable sound and immediately decreed that this sort of ‘rubbish’ would definitely ruin the radiogram needle. Eventually we came to a truce … I would change the needle before I played my record and then return the unruined one for him to listen to his ‘boring music.’ Fortunately for life in the Post household, Nola and her father had a far more harmonious time when it came to food. The family had a large thriving veggie garden and many fruit trees
