Qualla: Tweed Regional Gallery

Tweed Regional Gallery: Introduction

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. When Margaret Olley died in 2011, her home was less a house than an artwork in its own right. Inside a Paddington terrace and the adjoining shell of a former hat factory, the great Australian painter had assembled a glorious chaos: thousands of objects, jugs and flowers and crockery and fruit, stacked on every surface and arranged against richly coloured walls. It was the subject matter she painted for decades. Rather than let it scatter, the Tweed Regional Gallery did something extraordinary. It rebuilt the studio. Perched on a hillside above the Tweed River near Murwillumbah, the gallery is the kind of place Lonely Planet calls 'exceptional', home, in its words, to 'some of Australia's finest in a variety of media'.

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Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tweed Regional Gallery: The Studio That Was Reassembled

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Margaret Olley Art Centre opened on 15 March 2014, built at a cost of around four million dollars, and at its heart is a careful recreation of the rooms where Olley lived and worked, principally the spaces she called the Hat Factory and the Yellow Room. More than seventy-six ...

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Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tweed Regional Gallery: Twice an Archibald, Never the Subject Painter

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Olley was one of Australia's most beloved still-life and interior painters, but she also kept turning up on the other side of the easel. She was the subject of two Archibald Prize-winning portraits, an unusually rare distinction. The first came in 1948, when William Dobell painte...

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Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tweed Regional Gallery: The Richest Portrait Prize in the World

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kgbo, CC BY-SA 4.0. Portraiture runs deep at this gallery beyond the Olley connection. The Tweed Regional Gallery hosts the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, founded in 1988 and billed as the richest portrait prize anywhere on Earth, with 150,000 Australian dollars going to the winner. It also run...

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Image: Kgbo | CC BY-SA 4.0

Tweed Regional Gallery: Art in the Caldera

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aliceinthealice, CC BY 4.0. The setting earns its keep. The gallery sits within the Tweed Volcano caldera, looking out over the river and the cane fields toward the surrounding ranges, with the sacred peak of Wollumbin presiding over the southern horizon. On the grounds stands a sculpture by Tim Storrier ti...

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Image: Aliceinthealice | CC BY 4.0