Shoalhaven Regional Gallery and Nowra School of Arts Annex
Saturday 12 December 2026
2pm and 6pm
Join an incredible cast of musicians, performers and singers for a unique experience that once thrilled audiences over a century ago. We’ll gather to witness dramatic shipwrecks, hear tragic songs, see phantasmagoric apparitions, and experience beautiful colours whirling and pulsing above us in the dark.
It’s a magic lantern show!
‘Wrecked in the Shoalhaven’ will tell stories of the coast through an authentic brass and mahogany magic lantern from the Victorian era projecting actual magic lantern slides — detailed pictures painted by hand on glass, mechanically operated to produce special effects on the screen.
Contemporary musicians and singers will add to the magic as we experience the Walter Hood, driven on to a reef near Bendalong during a storm in 1870, or the Dandenong, sinking off Jervis Bay/Booderee in 1876.
The dramatic images of Samuel Elyard, famously eccentric historical painter of a wild and tempestuous Shoalhaven, will be seen like never before.
But that’s not all, there’s heartbreaking scenes of drunkenness and cruelty to be revealed and visions of damnation to be conjured.
And there may even be a man eating rats!
