'Hill End Public School' 19 panels depict students and staff around an image of the School. A country school with Headmistress and one full time teacher, the 17 students of all ages work together in a single class. Manning painted everyone in sittings of one and half hours or less, she also initiated a self portrait project with an exhibition combining students and her own works at the local church.

 The Inhabitants of Hill End

The Mobbs

 Hill End has attracted many artists to its streetscapes and buildings from the village’s 1870s goldmining heyday. In August 1947 Donald Friend and Russell Drysdale arrived, the former purchasing a cottage in Hill End now called Murrays Cottage. Visiting artists included Margaret Olley, Jean Bellette, Paul Haefliger, David Strachan and Jeffrey Smart. Eventually Bellette and Haefliger also bought a cottage. Haefligers and Murrays cottages are now part of the Hill End Artists in Residence Program.

Members of the Mobbs family not only remember Donald Friend but Albert Mobbs as a boy posed for Russell Drysdale’s The Cricketers. (1955).

 Walhalla, Victoria.

 Walhalla in Victoria’s Gippsland developed in the gold rush of late 1862. Also a town at the end of the road it contrasts with the Hill Ends topograhy and climate, being in a steep sided valley surrounded by alpine wilderness. A few committed residents remain all year in the town which now survives predominatly on tourism.

 Inhabitants of Walhalla