FROM LIT TLE THINGS, BIG THINGS GROW: THE VISION TO BUILD A CULTURAL CENTRE ‘Where did those words come from?’ Ulrike Klein asks herself; ruminating on the pivotal moment she made a commitment to build a Cultural Centre. ‘The vision was there, but I could not yet see how to bring it into realisation.’ It was not the first time she had trusted intuition. Twenty-five years earlier, she had boxed up her entire life, relocating from Germany to Australia on the promise of unpolluted land and the right climate. Through consistent hard work and perseverance, she turned a vision into a reality, co-creating Australia’s most internationally acclaimed skincare label. It was intuition, too, that led her to embark on a project to acquire a matched set of Guadagnini instruments for the Australian String Quartet. She put up fifty per cent of the price herself, trusting that a community of Australian music lovers would contribute the rest. As one scans over an abbreviated history of her life, shrewd, clairvoyant intuition appears at all the crucial junctures. There was, of course, a more practical reason why building a new Cultural Centre was a good idea. The makeshift concert room and the old mud-brick building adjacent to it were becoming increasingly cramped and restrictive for the growing audience. The toilet
facilities needed an upgrade, and even the heating was becoming temperamental: bowls of hot water were gracefully hauled into the green room to placate the shivering pianists, who would give their hands a pre-concert soak à la Glenn Gould. When the walkway between the concert room and afternoon tea facility began to groan and sigh ominously in the wind, Ulrike feared it might collapse. Something had to be done.
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