Nola Charles

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.

Nola 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

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

in the backyard of their house in Wollstonecraft. Jo worked overtime on his Fowlers Vacola fruit preserving outfit and Nola was crowned ‘his packer’, with every jar of fruit needing to be packed to the same standard as the produce winners at the Royal Easter Show.

Fruit preserving was only the beginning for Nola, who discovered early on in life that she loved to cook, particularly when there was music involved.

‘The musical crowd were all great party people and by my early teens I was cooking all sorts of things for these parties … and for the often famous musicians from Europe who performed with Dad … and then had nowhere to eat at the end of the concert (restaurants closed way before the end of an evening concert), so they would come home and I would cook.’

Decades later, Nola’s love for produce, good food and music fused at Birdsong Park, a 30-acre property at Lower Mangrove where she and her husband, neuro psychiatrist John Sydney Smith, built the house she had daydreamed about since she was a teenager.

‘We designed it especially with the idea of having intimate concerts supporting many of the musicians we had met along the way. With memories of my father’s garden, we grew lots PEOPLE OF THE COAST • Nola Charles

of organic vegetables each season, helping set up some local farmers markets, and using all the ingredients in our quarterly concert dinners with musicians such as Bradley Cooper (our favourite tenor) and Taikoz.’

The other event Nola established was The Musos Weekend — BYO instrument and sleeping bag — at which she and her son cooked for the whole weekend while singers and pianists and trumpeters all made music.

She misses those days, but is excited about her latest collaboration, working with talented local designers and builders on the refurbishment and upgrade of the old sandstone courthouse that has been home to the Central Coast Conservatorium of Music since 1984.

The project will continue Nola’s wonderful contribution to the arts sector, which has included being a member of the team who raised the first $ million for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 1988 and her deep involvement with the major redevelopment of the Sydney Conservatorium. A fitting legacy for the only child of one of Australia’s most memorable and remarkable musicians — and who will hopefully one day be able to find that elusive Middle C.

nolacharles.com