1986 - 2004

Peter Winkler was the Bondi Pavilion’s musician-in-residence from 1985 to 2004. Nineteen eighty-five was the International Year of Youth, and to celebrate it, Bondi Pavilion project officers Chrissie Shaw and Roz Newton planned a youth-music project they called the Bondi Youth Wave. When Peter came on board, he brought his experience at running songwriting workshops. He started his record-breaking residency not long after. Over time, Peter developed an extensive range of other programs with community members of all age groups and abilities and from a wide range of backgrounds. During the residency, the programs grew beyond Waverley and were taken into psychiatric hospitals and in of Art in Working Life programs. Peter’s senior-citizens group, in which the oldest member was 97, released CDs and cassettes every year for more than 15 years and performed only original material. The Junction House Band, comprising musicians who had an intellectual disability, came to be based at the Pavilion and recorded individual songs and several albums. The Bondi Youth Wave program began as a program for young people who were at risk and continues to this day. It started with an annual graduation concert and evolved to stage three graduation concert nights every year.

The Pavilion’s recording studio which began as a four-track in a storeroom evolved to an eight-track and then a 16-track in what later became the Pavilion wheelie-bin room. It finally realised its potential when state-of-the-art music studios that now ‘live’ in the Pavilion’s southern courtyard. Peter encouraged any program participants who wanted to write socially impactful and important songs, and equally encouraged anyone who wanted to write songs about having fun.

His commitment to community cultural development included political activism, especially when community cultural activity was under threat of privatisation. He was an activist through the 1987, 2000 Olympic and 2017 Save the Bondi Pavilion campaigns. When the musician-in-residence program came to an end in 2004, Peter commented, “The songwriting workshops were based on the principle that everyone can write a song, and a number of people say their life changed as a result of these music programs.”

Images courtesy Peter Winkler, Nicolette Boaz and the Waverley Library Local Studies Collection.