The annual Victorian Seniors Festival will be running again from 3-10 October with a bumper program of exhibitions, concerts and films, as well as sporting activities and information sessions.

More than 170,000 seniors are expected to attend the festival, which will feature over 1,000 free or low cost events statewide including an extensive program of activities to get you out and active.

The popular Veterans Golf Classic returns with tournaments organised by 12 participating clubs across Victoria from late September to 28 October.

For those who’d like to try their hand at something new, several croquet clubs will be offering free come and try sessions while Bowls Victoria will be holding Open Door Days at a number of metropolitan and regional venues.

Other activities to try include tai chi, badminton, aqua aerobics and strength classes, which are all part of the festival’s Active Living and Health and Wellbeing events program.

For nature lovers, there’s a terrific program of walking tours across Victoria. In Baw Baw Shire, the Strzelecki Bushwalking Club will be running a Go for your Life Seniors Walk while closer to Melbourne the Explore Kurth Kiln Regional Park walking tour, conducted by Parks Victoria, takes in the park’s natural features such as Ship Rock Falls and the WWII kilns used to make charcoal for gas to run cars.

In the city, Urban Discovery Tours are running seven Heritage Walking Tours across Melbourne including the intriguing ‘Haunted St Kilda’, ‘Melbourne’s dunny lanes’, and ‘Solve Melbourne’s cold cases’.

For more details about these events pick up a festival program at your nearest Coles supermarket, local council, neighbourhood house, library or festival venue from 17 August.

For more information about the 2010 Victorian Seniors Festival visit www.seniors.vic.gov.au/seniorsfestival or phone 1800 136 762.

Ernst Ludwig KIRCHNER, German 1880–1938: Reclining woman in a white chemise 1909 (Liegende Frau im weiβen Hemd), oil on canvas, 95.0 x 121.0 cm, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main. Acquired in 1950.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s 2010 Winter Masterpieces exhibition comes to Melbourne courtesy of renovations at the home of one of Europe’s oldest and finest art institutions, the Städel Museum in Frankfurt.  The Städel’s rich holdings encompass 700 years of European art history, but this exhibition is selected from the museum’s superb collection of European art of the 19th and 20th centuries.

As a citizens’ museum with a strong teaching and research focus, the collection policy at the Städel ensured that fine examples of successive artistic developments in Europe were acquired over these centuries providing a basis of impressive overview to this exhibition.

“This blockbuster exhibition provides a superb survey of the key artistic movements of the time, including Realism, Impressionism and Post Impressionism, German Romanticism, Expressionism and Modernism, and French Symbolism,” says NGV director Dr Gerard Vaughan.

Relationships, sometimes unexpected, between German and French painting are an undercurrent of this show, which also brings some excellent examples of French Impressionist works by artists like Monet, Renoir, Degas and Cezanne.

There are highlights of German painting from Tischbein’s iconic painting, Goethe in the Roman Campagna (as the director of the Städel, Max Hollein, remarks “perhaps not the best painting in the collection, but certainly the best known within Germany) to the remarkable “exhibition within an exhibition” of works by the influential German painter, Max Beckmann, who spent much of his working life in Frankfurt.

Among several interesting stories behind works in this exhibition is the explanation for the rather uncomfortable relationship Beckmann achieves between the two women portrayed in his Double Portrait.  He brings together the wife of his friend George Swarzenski, the then director of the Stadel and Carola Netter, Swarzenski’s mistress.  The director accepted the painting as a gift to the museum’s collection, but it remained in storage for a very long time.

Another painting with a history worth reporting is among the modernist works that display German art within the broader context of major European art movements.  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Reclining woman in a white chemise, was only last October discovered by the Städel Museum on the back of another Kirchner canvas.  The 1909 painting is being shown in Melbourne for one of the first times since it was painted and we have the opportunity to see it before the citizens of Frankfurt, who must wait until it is returned and hung in their newly renovated museum in 2011.

European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th-20th Century is at the NGV, St Kilda Road, until  10 October 2010.  Open daily 10am to 5pm and until 9pm Wednesdays for art-after-dark.   Admission $23/$18.  Information: www.ngv.vic.gov.au

Titanic was 882 feet 5 inches long (268.98m) and weighed 46,328 tons.  There were 1316 passengers and 885 crew on board before she sank in April 1912.  Image © Premier Exhibitions Inc

Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition is already at the Melbourne Museum bringing us the opportunity to experience life aboard Titanic, navigating our way through more than 280 original artefacts and structural reproductions that reveal so many secrets about this fateful journey.  We also see much general, design and social history through the prism of life on board the Titanic and the stories of its passengers and crew.

Each visitor is presented with a replica boarding pass of an actual passenger, drawing them back in time to 1912 for a journey that takes in reproductions of the impressive Grand Staircase, First Class and Third Class Cabins as well as a fascinating array of objects conserved from the sea bed revealing the human stories behind life aboard Titanic.  Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition is at Melbourne Museum until 17 October and you can book on line, www.titanicmelbourne.com or telephone 13 11 02.

The National Gallery of Victoria’s Winter Masterpiece exhibition, is always in the ‘much anticipated’ category (this is the seventh NGV Winter Masterpiece exhibition).  This year, European Masters: Stadel Museum 19th-20th Century promises to treat us to a superb collection of European art.  Frankfurt’s Stadel Museum has one of the world’s finest art collections and the selection of more than 100 works from 70 of the world’s most influential artists ensures a comprehensive overview of the museum’s holdings from the past two centuries of European art.  European Masters opens on 19 June at NGV International in St Kilda Road.

Other offerings in the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series include a wonderful exposition of filmmaker Tim Burton’s work at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).  Tim Burton: The Exhibition, opens on 24 June and provides a multitude of different ways into the magical world of Tim Burton, including rarely seen photographs, his paintings, drawings, puppets and costumes, short films and animations.

In July, watch for the highly acclaimed ‘spoon full of sugar’ blockbuster show, Mary Poppins, brought to the stage at Her Majesty’s Theatre by Disney and Cameron Mackintosh.  There is musical theatre in abundance to come: Fame – The Musical, West Side Story and Hairspray will all be here in winter and for the film buff, there’s the Melbourne International Film Festival.  If design is your passion July brings the State of Design Festival and August brings Melbourne Art Week and the Melbourne Art Fair.

Gold medal winter Olympian Steven Bradbury is an enthusiastic supporter of St Vincents and Mercy Private Hospital’s (SVMP) new and creative Ruby Red Socks Falls Prevention Program. No explanation needed when you think about it.
Mindful that falls are a growing issue in an ageing community in everyday life and in hospitals, SVMP developed their falls prevention program and conducted a pilot in two wards involving 724 patients, 96 of whom were considered at high risk of falls.
“During the pilot phase of the program, which was warmly embraced by staff and patients, falls were significantly reduced when comparing with the same wards during the same period in the previous year,” says Mr Martin Day, CEO of SVMP.
Strategies used in the program include provision of non-slip Ruby Red Socks, which are physiotherapist designed and clinically tested in Australia to assist in the reduction of falls within the hospital setting. The socks also serve as a visual reminder for staff to identify high falls risk patients, and to remind patients to take care when moving about in SVMP hospitals.
The program embraces patient and staff education, making patients, relatives and staff aware of the increased risk of falls in hospitals with posters and other reminders.
“Over a third of all hospital-acquired injuries are caused by falls,” says Mr Christos Kondogiannis, an Orthopaedic Surgeon at SVMP. “Unfortunately, a serious fall in a hospital — indeed anywhere in the community — can have severe implications and may event result in death, particularly if it causes broken bones or major complications to physically vulnerable aged patients.”
“This program is designed to help prevent falls within SVMP facilities, but the burden of falls doesn’t end when you leave hospital,” says Mr Day. “We urge the community to become more actively involved in falls prevention — including assessing risky areas around the house and providing additional support to elderly loved ones when required.”