THE ART OF COUNTRY

Lawyer turned gallery owner Allison Bellinger brings contemporary Australian art to the world from her home base in remote country NSW.

- KIRSTY MCKENZIE

Allison Bellinger cheerfully admits she knew nothing about running an art gallery when she opened her exhibition space in the centre of Inverell in rural northern NSW. The town is better known for agriculture and gemstones than a passing parade of potential art investors. But the former Sydney lawyer trusted her instincts and long interest in art and aesthetics and, in 2016, launched AK Bellinger Gallery with a sell-out show of works by contemporary Australian artist and three-time Archibald Prize finalist Vanessa Stockard.

"I'd bought some of her paintings," Allison explains. "Through the years, we'd become friends and she generously offered to give me my first show. There was real local interest in what I was doing, and opening night was wall-to-wall with people. Vanessa and her husband came up for the night and they were treated like celebrities as they walked around town. People in Inverell have embraced the opportunity to see artists of this quality and now I have a small, but growing, local clientele and the gallery has also become a destination for people to bring their visitors."

Allison and her husband, Brad, live north of Inverell on Trevanna, where they run sheep and cattle and grow fodder crops with their children, Olivia and Jack. Brad, who grew up in Cressy in Tasmania, and Allison, who was born at Warren in central NSW but came to Sydney for boarding school and university, met when Allison was living in a share house with four Tasmanians. By that stage, Brad, who studied agriculture at Marcus Oldham College in Geelong, had bought a farm on the Victorian side of the Murray at Yarrawonga.