Issue No. 14 — Spring 2026

Advertisement

“My eyes can’t find the fine line any more. And the fine line is the whole dancer.” — Why a 75-year-old folk painter from the Bellinger Valley is letting her last 160 hand-painted wind dancers go for far less than they’re worth.

Bellingen, NSW — By Lorelle Haines, Contributing Editor

The Bellinger Valley runs from the Dorrigo escarpment down to the sea, all green paddocks, river flats and rainforest gullies. Out past the edge of Bellingen, behind a weatherboard farmhouse with a sagging verandah, there’s an old timber dairy shed nobody has milked a cow in since 1994. The louvres let the morning light in in stripes. On a long shelf along the back wall stand the last of Valmai Kerslake’s dancers.

Valmai is 75. For forty-one years she painted dinnerware by hand in the paint room of a stoneware pottery down on the coast — blue birds, blue vines, blue wildflowers, freehand, eight hours a day. When the pottery shut in 2011, she carried her brushes home in a Milo tin.

Since 2012, she has made only one thing: small hand-painted figures of women in wide bell skirts, with long, loose legs, that hang from a cord and dance whenever the wind picks up.

There are 160 left on that shelf. After those, she puts the brushes down.

The Doll She Hung Up to Dry

The first one was never meant to move. In January 2012, Valmai made a little figure for her granddaughter Tahnee, who was six and wanted “a lady in a big skirt.” She ran out of glue before she could fix the legs in place, so she hung them loose on a wire under the skirt and hooked the whole thing on a nail under the verandah to let the paint dry.

Two days later a summer storm came down off the Dorrigo escarpment. Valmai was at the kitchen sink when she looked up and saw it through the window.

The little lady was turning on her cord. Slowly at first, then in wide, lazy circles, her skirt swinging out, her loose legs kicking and crossing underneath like she was taking the first steps of a waltz. Every gust, a new step.

Tahnee got her dancer that weekend. By Easter, Valmai had made a dozen more, every skirt a little different, every one with its legs left loose on purpose. She hasn’t made anything else since.

People Always Ask Where the Motor Is

Visitors to the shed always do the same thing. They watch a dancer turn by the open door, legs swinging, and they look for the battery. There isn’t one. No motor, no spring, no switch. Just a hand-painted lady on a cord and whatever the air is doing.

In a light breeze she sways a little, back and forth, like someone humming to herself. In a steady nor’easter she turns, slowly, her skirt swinging out and her legs drifting behind her. When a proper storm rolls through, she spins and kicks like a girl at a woolshed dance.

Because each one hangs from a single point at her raised hand, she moves with the smallest draught — even an open kitchen window is enough.

Watch Her Dance

No batteries and no gears. Just a painted lady on a cord, and a bit of wind.

Why None of Them Has a Face

On Valmai’s kitchen windowsill stands a little doll made from an old wooden dolly peg, wrapped in a scrap of faded floral cotton. Her mum, June, made it for her in 1956 out of the clothes-peg bag, the way mums in the bush made them for generations. It has no face. June never painted faces on them.

“I asked her once why she didn’t draw a face on,” Valmai says. “She said a doll with no face can be anybody you love. You look at it and you see who you need to see.”

So none of the dancers has a face. People tell Valmai the Reader looks just like their sister, or the Harvest dancer is their mum at the Bellingen Show. That’s the whole point.

When the sky goes dark over the escarpment, Valmai makes a cuppa, leans on that windowsill next to June’s peg doll, and watches the dancer on the verandah begin to turn.

Five Dancers, Five Stories

Valmai never planned a collection. Each dancer came from something around the place.

The Painter is Valmai herself, at nineteen, in her first week in the pottery paint room, holding a palette she wasn’t yet allowed to use on the good plates.

The Harvest dancer is her sister Noreen, who has grown Queensland Blue pumpkins on the same patch at Thora for fifty years and carries the best one into the Bellingen Show pavilion like a baby.

The Bluebird came from the superb fairy-wrens that nest in the grevillea by the shed door. A little blue cock bird has been hopping along that fence every spring since 2009. Tahnee always called him the bluebird, and the name stuck.

The Reader is Tahnee — the six-year-old who got the very first dancer, and who spent every school holidays afterwards reading in the old cane chair on the verandah.

The Bouquet is the wildflowers Valmai carried down the aisle in 1972, picked that morning from the roadside on the Waterfall Way by her husband, Col. He passed in 2019. She paints that one slowest.

The Crock on the Shelf Above the Paint Table

Valmai keeps the letters in a big stoneware crock with a chip out of the rim, one of the last pieces to come out of the pottery’s kiln. There are a few hundred by now: cards, notes on the backs of envelopes, the odd photo. She took three out when I asked.

The first was from a woman named Margaret in Armidale, who hung a Bouquet dancer outside the window of the room where her husband spent his last spring. “He couldn’t say much by then,” she wrote. “But every time the wind turned her round, he’d lift one finger and smile.”

The second came from a retired postie named Graham in Ballarat, sixty-eight, who bought a Bluebird “as a joke” for his wife’s birthday and now admits he’s the one sitting on the back deck waiting for the wind.

The third was a folded card from a woman named Jillian in Hobart. One sentence, in green ink: “Every storm used to frighten me. Now I go to the window to watch her dance.”

“You paint plates for forty years and somebody eats off them and never gives you a thought,” Valmai says. “With these, people write back.”

Five Things the Shop-Bought Ones Get Wrong

Valmai has bought the cheap ones to see what people are being sold. She keeps finding the same five problems.

Why She’s Putting the Brush Down

Two winters ago, the line started to wobble. Valmai thought it was her hand. It was her eyes. The specialist in Coffs Harbour called it macular degeneration — the centre of her sight going soft, the edges still fine.

She can still mix a colour. She can still see a dancer turning from across the shed. What she can’t do any more is put a vine one hair wide around a bell skirt and know it’s straight.

So she painted one last batch, slowly, through the winter and into spring, with the lamp pulled down close: 160 dancers, all five designs. When those are gone, there won’t be any more.

A hand-painted folk-art piece from a gallery in Byron Bay runs well past two hundred dollars. Valmai is letting the last 160 go for not much more than the cost of her materials and the postage. She knocked back a gift-shop chain in Sydney that wanted the whole shelf, and a collector from Brisbane who offered to buy every Bouquet.

“I don’t need the money,” she says. “I need them out in the wind. One sitting in a box in somebody’s cupboard is a dancer who never gets to dance.”

Valmai doesn’t own a computer. Tahnee, twenty now, set up the little online shop last spring after she posted a video of her own dancer spinning on her share-house balcony in Newcastle and woke up to 214 messages. Valmai still writes a card by hand for every order.

“I Catch Myself Watching Her for an Hour” — What They Wrote Valmai After the First Windy Day

Four Honest Questions Before You Order

Forty-one years of painted plates. Fourteen years of dancers. One shelf left.

More From the Verandahs They Landed On

DISCLOSURE: This is a paid advertisement. The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences. Images are for illustration; because every dancer is painted by hand, colours and pattern details vary slightly from piece to piece. Please review the full return policy before ordering.